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Cover design: Jim Manis; art work: Henry Fuseli. Hamlet and the Ghost, 1789. Plate XLIV from Volume II of
Boydell’s Shakespeare Prints; the illustration in Boydell is based on the original painting of 1789. The text
accompanying the engraving: “Hamlet. Act I. Scene IV. A platform before the Castle of Elsineur. Hamlet,
Horatio, Marcellus, and the Ghost. Painted by H. Fuseli, R. A. Engraved by R. Thew.”

Copyright © 1998 The Pennsylvania State University

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 DRAMATIS PERSONAE
HAMLET
CLAUDIUS: king of Denmark. (KING CLAUDIUS:)
By
HAMLET: son to the late, and nephew to the present king.

William Shakespeare POLONIUS: lord chamberlain. (LORD POLONIUS:)

(written about 1602)
HORATIO: friend to Hamlet.

LAERTES: son to Polonius.

LUCIANUS: nephew to the king.

VOLTIMAND, CORNELIUS, ROSENCRANTZ,

GUILDENSTERN & OSRIC: courtiers.

A Gentleman, (Gentlemen:)

A Priest. (First Priest:)

MARCELLUS & BERNARDO: officers.

FRANCISCO: a soldier.

Eugène Delacroix from a series of thirteen lithographs based REYNALDO: servant to Polonius.
on Hamlet — 1843 (“Alas, poor Yorick!”)
3
 Hamlet, Act I, scene i
Players. HAMLET
(First Player:)
(Player King:)
(Player Queen:) ACT I
Two Clowns, grave-diggers.
(First Clown:) SCENE I: Elsinore. A platform before the castle.
(Second Clown:)
[FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO.]
FORTINBRAS: prince of Norway. (PRINCE FORTINBRAS:)
A Captain. BERNARDO: Who’s there?
English Ambassadors. (First Ambassador:)
FRANCISCO: Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.
GERTRUDE: queen of Denmark, and mother to Hamlet.
(QUEEN GERTRUDE:) BERNARDO: Long live the king!
OPHELIA: daughter to Polonius.
FRANCISCO: Bernardo?
Lords, Ladies, Officers, Soldiers, Sailors, Messengers, and
other Attendants. BERNARDO: He.
(Lord:)
(First Sailor:) FRANCISCO: You come most carefully upon your hour.
(Messenger:)
BERNARDO: ’Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.
Ghost of Hamlet’s Father. (Ghost:)
FRANCISCO: For this relief much thanks: ’tis bitter cold,
SCENE: Denmark. And I am sick at heart.

BERNARDO: Have you had quiet guard?

4
 Hamlet, Act I, scene i
FRANCISCO: Not a mouse stirring. What, is Horatio there?

BERNARDO: Well, good night. HORATIO: A piece of him.

If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,
The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste. BERNARDO: Welcome, Horatio: welcome, good Marcellus.

FRANCISCO: I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who’s there? MARCELLUS: What, has this thing appear’d again to-night?

[Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS.] BERNARDO: I have seen nothing.

HORATIO: Friends to this ground. MARCELLUS: Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,
And will not let belief take hold of him
MARCELLUS: And liegemen to the Dane. Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
FRANCISCO: Give you good night. With us to watch the minutes of this night;
That if again this apparition come,
MARCELLUS: O, farewell, honest soldier: He may approve our eyes and speak to it.
Who hath relieved you?
HORATIO: Tush, tush, ‘twill not appear.
FRANCISCO: Bernardo has my place.
Give you good night. BERNARDO: Sit down awhile;
And let us once again assail your ears,
[Exit.] That are so fortified against our story
What we have two nights seen.
MARCELLUS: Holla! Bernardo!
HORATIO: Well, sit we down,
BERNARDO: Say, And let us hear Bernardo speak of this.
5
 Hamlet, Act I, scene i
BERNARDO: Last night of all, MARCELLUS: It is offended.
When yond same star that’s westward from the pole
Had made his course to illume that part of heaven BERNARDO: See, it stalks away!
Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,
The bell then beating one,— HORATIO: Stay! speak, speak! I charge thee, speak!

[Enter Ghost.] [Exit Ghost.]

MARCELLUS: Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes
again!
BERNARDO: In the same figure, like the king that’s dead.
MARCELLUS: Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.
BERNARDO: Looks it not like the king? mark it, Horatio.
HORATIO: Most like: it harrows me with fear and wonder.
BERNARDO: It would be spoke to.
MARCELLUS: Question it, Horatio.
HORATIO: What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,
Together with that fair and warlike form
In which the majesty of buried Denmark
Did sometimes march? by heaven I charge thee, speak!
6
MARCELLUS: ’Tis gone, and will not answer.
BERNARDO: How now, Horatio! you tremble and look pale:
Is not this something more than fantasy?
What think you on’t?
HORATIO: Before my God, I might not this believe
Without the sensible and true avouch
Of mine own eyes.
MARCELLUS: Is it not like the king?
HORATIO: As thou art to thyself:
Such was the very armor he had on
When he the ambitious Norway combated;
So frown’d he once, when, in an angry parle,
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.
’Tis strange.
 Hamlet, Act I, scene i
MARCELLUS: Thus twice before, and jump at this dead
hour,
With martial stalk hath he gone by our watch.
HORATIO: In what particular thought to work I know not;
But in the gross and scope of my opinion,
This bodes some strange eruption to our state.
MARCELLUS: Good now, sit down, and tell me, he that
knows,
Why this same strict and most observant watch
So nightly toils the subject of the land,
And why such daily cast of brazen cannon,
And foreign mart for implements of war;
Why such impress of shipwrights, whose sore task
Does not divide the Sunday from the week;
What might be toward, that this sweaty haste
Doth make the night joint-laborer with the day:
Who is’t that can inform me?
HORATIO: That can I;
At least, the whisper goes so. Our last king,
Whose image even but now appear’d to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto prick’d on by a most emulate pride,
Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet—
For so this side of our known world esteem’d him—
7
Did slay this Fortinbras; who by a seal’d compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands
Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror:
Against the which, a moiety competent
Was gaged by our king; which had return’d
To the inheritance of Fortinbras,
Had he been vanquisher; as, by the same covenant,
And carriage of the article design’d,
His fell to Hamlet. Now, sir, young Fortinbras,
Of unimproved mettle hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Shark’d up a list of lawless resolutes,
For food and diet, to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in’t; which is no other—
As it doth well appear unto our state—
But to recover of us, by strong hand
And terms compulsatory, those foresaid lands
So by his father lost: and this, I take it,
Is the main motive of our preparations,
The source of this our watch and the chief head
Of this post-haste and romage in the land.
BERNARDO: I think it be no other but e’en so:
Well may it sort that this portentous figure
Comes armed through our watch; so like the king
That was and is the question of these wars.
 Hamlet, Act I, scene i
HORATIO: A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse:
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.—
But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!
[Re-enter Ghost.]
I’ll cross it, though it blast me. Stay, illusion!
If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,
Speak to me:
If there be any good thing to be done,
That may to thee do ease and grace to me,
Speak to me:
[Cock crows.]
8
If thou art privy to thy country’s fate,
Which, happily, foreknowing may avoid,
O, speak!
Or if thou hast uphoarded in thy life
Extorted treasure in the womb of earth,
For which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death,
Speak of it: stay, and speak! Stop it, Marcellus.
MARCELLUS: Shall I strike at it with my partisan?
HORATIO: Do, if it will not stand.
BERNARDO: ’Tis here!
HORATIO: ’Tis here!
MARCELLUS: ’Tis gone!
[Exit Ghost.]
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence;
For it is, as the air, invulnerable,
And our vain blows malicious mockery.
BERNARDO: It was about to speak, when the cock crew.
 Hamlet, Act I, scene ii
HORATIO: And then it started like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons. I have heard,
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn,
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat
Awake the god of day; and, at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
The extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine: and of the truth herein
This present object made probation.
MARCELLUS: It faded on the crowing of the cock.
Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.
HORATIO: So have I heard and do in part believe it.
But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill:
Break we our watch up; and by my advice,
Let us impart what we have seen to-night
Unto young Hamlet; for, upon my life,
This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.
Do you consent we shall acquaint him with it,
9
As needful in our loves, fitting our duty?
MARCELLUS: Let’s do’t, I pray; and I this morning know
Where we shall find him most conveniently.
[Exeunt.]
SCENE II: A room of state in the castle.
[Enter KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE, HAMLET,
POLONIUS, LAERTES, VOLTIMAND, CORNELIUS, Lords,
and Attendants.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s
death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him,
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
The imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as ‘twere with a defeated joy,—
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,—
 Hamlet, Act I, scene ii
Taken to wife: nor have we herein barr’d
Your better wisdoms, which have freely gone
With this affair along. For all, our thanks.
Now follows, that you know, young Fortinbras,
Holding a weak supposal of our worth,
Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death
Our state to be disjoint and out of frame,
Colleagued with the dream of his advantage,
He hath not fail’d to pester us with message,
Importing the surrender of those lands
Lost by his father, with all bonds of law,
To our most valiant brother. So much for him.
Now for ourself and for this time of meeting:
Thus much the business is: we have here writ
To Norway, uncle of young Fortinbras,—
Who, impotent and bed-rid, scarcely hears
Of this his nephew’s purpose,—to suppress
His further gait herein; in that the levies,
The lists and full proportions, are all made
Out of his subject: and we here dispatch
You, good Cornelius, and you, Voltimand,
For bearers of this greeting to old Norway;
Giving to you no further personal power
To business with the king, more than the scope
Of these delated articles allow.
Farewell, and let your haste commend your duty.
10
CORNELIUS & VOLTIMAND: In that and all things
will we show our duty.
KING CLAUDIUS: We doubt it nothing: heartily farewell.
[Exeunt VOLTIMAND and CORNELIUS.]
And now, Laertes, what’s the news with you?
You told us of some suit; what is’t, Laertes?
You cannot speak of reason to the Dane,
And loose your voice: what wouldst thou beg, Laertes,
That shall not be my offer, not thy asking?
The head is not more native to the heart,
The hand more instrumental to the mouth,
Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.
What wouldst thou have, Laertes?
LAERTES: My dread lord,
Your leave and favor to return to France;
From whence though willingly I came to Denmark,
To show my duty in your coronation,
Yet now, I must confess, that duty done,
My thoughts and wishes bend again toward France
And bow them to your gracious leave and pardon.
KING CLAUDIUS: Have you your father’s leave? What
 Hamlet, Act I, scene ii
says Polonius?
LORD POLONIUS: He hath, my lord, wrung from me
my slow leave
By laborsome petition, and at last
Upon his will I seal’d my hard consent:
I do beseech you, give him leave to go.
KING CLAUDIUS: Take thy fair hour, Laertes; time be thine,
And thy best graces spend it at thy will!
But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son,—
HAMLET: [Aside] A little more than kin, and less than kind.
KING CLAUDIUS: How is it that the clouds still hang
on you?
HAMLET: Not so, my lord; I am too much i’ the sun.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted
color off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
11
HAMLET: Ay, madam, it is common.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee?
HAMLET: Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not ‘seems.’
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected ‘havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
KING CLAUDIUS: ’Tis sweet and commendable in your
nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; ’tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
 Hamlet, Act I, scene ii
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool’d:
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! ’tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd: whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died to-day,
‘This must be so.’ We pray you, throw to earth
This unprevailing woe, and think of us
As of a father: for let the world take note,
You are the most immediate to our throne;
And with no less nobility of love
Than that which dearest father bears his son,
Do I impart toward you. For your intent
In going back to school in Wittenberg,
It is most retrograde to our desire:
And we beseech you, bend you to remain
Here, in the cheer and comfort of our eye,
Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Let not thy mother lose her prayers,
Hamlet:
I pray thee, stay with us; go not to Wittenberg.
12
HAMLET: I shall in all my best obey you, madam.
KING CLAUDIUS: Why, ’tis a loving and a fair reply:
Be as ourself in Denmark. Madam, come;
This gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet
Sits smiling to my heart: in grace whereof,
No jocund health that Denmark drinks to-day,
But the great cannon to the clouds shall tell,
And the king’s rouse the heavens all bruit again,
Re-speaking earthly thunder. Come away.
[Exeunt all but HAMLET.]
HAMLET: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
 Hamlet, Act I, scene ii
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month—
Let me not think on’t—Frailty, thy name is woman!—
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears:—why she, even she—
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer—married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.
[Enter HORATIO, MARCELLUS, and BERNARDO.]
HORATIO: Hail to your lordship!
HAMLET: I am glad to see you well:
Horatio,—or I do forget myself.
HORATIO: The same, my lord, and your poor servant ever.
13
HAMLET: Sir, my good friend; I’ll change that name with
you:
And what make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?
Marcellus?
MARCELLUS: My good lord—
HAMLET: I am very glad to see you. Good even, sir.
But what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg?
HORATIO: A truant disposition, good my lord.
HAMLET: I would not hear your enemy say so,
Nor shall you do mine ear that violence,
To make it truster of your own report
Against yourself: I know you are no truant.
But what is your affair in Elsinore?
We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.
HORATIO: My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.
HAMLET: I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student;
I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.
HORATIO: Indeed, my lord, it follow’d hard upon.
HAMLET: Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats
 Hamlet, Act I, scene ii
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven
Or ever I had seen that day, Horatio!
My father!—methinks I see my father.
HORATIO: Where, my lord?
HAMLET: In my mind’s eye, Horatio.
HORATIO: I saw him once; he was a goodly king.
HAMLET: He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
HORATIO: My lord, I think I saw him yesternight.
HAMLET: Saw? who?
HORATIO: My lord, the king your father.
HAMLET: The king my father!
HORATIO: Season your admiration for awhile
With an attent ear, till I may deliver,
Upon the witness of these gentlemen,
This marvel to you.
14
HAMLET: For God’s love, let me hear.
HORATIO: Two nights together had these gentlemen,
Marcellus and Bernardo, on their watch,
In the dead vast and middle of the night,
Been thus encounter’d. A figure like your father,
Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pe,
Appears before them, and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by them: thrice he walk’d
By their oppress’d and fear-surprised eyes,
Within his truncheon’s length; whilst they, distilled
Almost to jelly with the act of fear,
Stand dumb and speak not to him. This to me
In dreadful secrecy impart they did;
And I with them the third night kept the watch;
Where, as they had deliver’d, both in time,
Form of the thing, each word made true and good,
The apparition comes: I knew your father;
These hands are not more like.
HAMLET: But where was this?
MARCELLUS: My lord, upon the platform where we watch’d.
HAMLET: Did you not speak to it?
HORATIO: My lord, I did;
 Hamlet, Act I, scene ii

But answer made it none: yet once methought HORATIO: O, yes, my lord; he wore his beaver up.
It lifted up its head and did address
Itself to motion, like as it would speak; HAMLET: What, look’d he frowningly?
But even then the morning cock crew loud,
And at the sound it shrunk in haste away, HORATIO: A countenance more in sorrow than in anger.
And vanish’d from our sight.
HAMLET: Pale or red?
HAMLET: ’Tis very strange.
HORATIO: Nay, very pale.
HORATIO: As I do live, my honor’d lord, ’tis true;
And we did think it writ down in our duty HAMLET: And fix’d his eyes upon you?
To let you know of it.
HORATIO: Most constantly.
HAMLET: Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this troubles me.
Hold you the watch to-night? HAMLET: I would I had been there.

MARCELLUS & BERNARDO: We do, my lord. HORATIO: It would have much amazed you.

HAMLET: Arm’d, say you? HAMLET: Very like, very like. Stay’d it long?

MARCELLUS & BERNARDO: Arm’d, my lord. HORATIO: While one with moderate haste might tell a
hundred.
HAMLET: From top to toe?
MARCELLUS & BERNARDO: Longer, longer.
MARCELLUS & BERNARDO: My lord, from head to foot.
HORATIO: Not when I saw’t.
HAMLET: Then saw you not his face?
15
 Hamlet, Act I, scene iii

HAMLET: His beard was grizzled—no? My father’s spirit in arms! all is not well;
I doubt some foul play: would the night were come!
HORATIO: It was, as I have seen it in his life, Till then sit still, my soul: foul deeds will rise,
A sable silver’d. Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.

HAMLET: I will watch to-night; [Exit.]

Perchance ‘twill walk again.
HORATIO: I warrant it will.
HAMLET: If it assume my noble father’s person,
I’ll speak to it, though hell itself should gape
And bid me hold my peace. I pray you all,
If you have hitherto conceal’d this sight,
Let it be tenable in your silence still;
And whatsoever else shall hap to-night,
Give it an understanding, but no tongue:
I will requite your loves. So, fare you well:
Upon the platform, ‘twixt eleven and twelve,
I’ll visit you.
All: Our duty to your honor.
HAMLET: Your loves, as mine to you: farewell.
SCENE III: A room in Polonius’ house.
[Enter LAERTES and OPHELIA.]
LAERTES: My necessaries are embark’d: farewell:
And, sister, as the winds give benefit
And convoy is assistant, do not sleep,
But let me hear from you.
OPHELIA: Do you doubt that?
LAERTES: For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute;
No more.

[Exeunt all but HAMLET.] OPHELIA: No more but so?

16
 Hamlet, Act I, scene iii
LAERTES: Think it no more;
For nature, crescent, does not grow alone
In thews and bulk, but, as this temple waxes,
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withal. Perhaps he loves you now,
And now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch
The virtue of his will: but you must fear,
His greatness weigh’d, his will is not his own;
For he himself is subject to his birth:
He may not, as unvalued persons do,
Carve for himself; for on his choice depends
The safety and health of this whole state;
And therefore must his choice be circumscribed
Unto the voice and yielding of that body
Whereof he is the head. Then if he says he loves you,
It fits your wisdom so far to believe it
As he in his particular act and place
May give his saying deed; which is no further
Than the main voice of Denmark goes withal.
Then weigh what loss your honor may sustain,
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmaster’d importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
17
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
Virtue itself ‘scapes not calumnious strokes:
The canker galls the infants of the spring,
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear:
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
OPHELIA: I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whiles, like a puff ’d and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.
LAERTES: O, fear me not.
I stay too long: but here my father comes.
[Enter POLONIUS.]
A double blessing is a double grace,
Occasion smiles upon a second leave.
LORD POLONIUS: Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard,
for shame!
 Hamlet, Act I, scene iii
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay’d for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch’d, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!
18
LAERTES: Most humbly do I take my leave, my lord.
LORD POLONIUS: The time invites you; go; your
servants tend.
LAERTES: Farewell, Ophelia; and remember well
What I have said to you.
OPHELIA: ’Tis in my memory lock’d,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.
LAERTES: Farewell.
[Exit.]
LORD POLONIUS: What is’t, Ophelia, be hath said to you?
OPHELIA: So please you, something touching the Lord
Hamlet.
LORD POLONIUS: Marry, well bethought:
’Tis told me, he hath very oft of late
Given private time to you; and you yourself
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous:
If it be so, as so ’tis put on me,
And that in way of caution, I must tell you,
You do not understand yourself so clearly
 Hamlet, Act I, scene iii
As it behoves my daughter and your honor.
What is between you? give me up the truth.
OPHELIA: He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders
Of his affection to me.
LORD POLONIUS: Affection! pooh! you speak like a green
girl,
Unsifted in such perilous circumstance.
Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?
OPHELIA: I do not know, my lord, what I should think.
LORD POLONIUS: Marry, I’ll teach you: think yourself
a baby;
That you have ta’en these tenders for true pay,
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly;
Or—not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,
Running it thus—you’ll tender me a fool.
OPHELIA: My lord, he hath importuned me with love
In honorable fashion.
LORD POLONIUS: Ay, fashion you may call it; go to, go to.
OPHELIA: And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord,
With almost all the holy vows of heaven.
19
LORD POLONIUS: Ay, springes to catch woodcocks. I
do know,
When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul
Lends the tongue vows: these blazes, daughter,
Giving more light than heat, extinct in both,
Even in their promise, as it is a-making,
You must not take for fire. From this time
Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence;
Set your entreatments at a higher rate
Than a command to parley. For Lord Hamlet,
Believe so much in him, that he is young
And with a larger tether may he walk
Than may be given you: in few, Ophelia,
Do not believe his vows; for they are brokers,
Not of that dye which their investments show,
But mere implorators of unholy suits,
Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds,
The better to beguile. This is for all:
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth,
Have you so slander any moment leisure,
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.
Look to’t, I charge you: come your ways.
OPHELIA: I shall obey, my lord.
[Exeunt.]
 Hamlet, Act I, scene iv
SCENE IV: The platform.
[Enter HAMLET, HORATIO, and MARCELLUS.]
HAMLET: The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold.
HORATIO: It is a nipping and an eager air.
HAMLET: What hour now?
HORATIO: I think it lacks of twelve.
HAMLET: No, it is struck.
HORATIO: Indeed? I heard it not: then it draws near the
season
Wherein the spirit held his wont to walk.
[A flourish of trumpets, and ordnance shot off, within.]
What does this mean, my lord?
HAMLET: The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,
Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;
And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,
The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out
The triumph of his pledge.
20
HORATIO: Is it a custom?
HAMLET: Ay, marry, is’t:
But to my mind, though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honor’d in the breach than the observance.
This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and tax’d of other nations:
They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition; and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though perform’d at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
So, oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As, in their birth—wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin—
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o’er-leavens
The form of plausive manners, that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star,—
Their virtues else—be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo—
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault: the dram of eale
Doth all the noble substance of a doubt
 Hamlet, Act I, scene iv
To his own scandal.
HORATIO: Look, my lord, it comes!
[Enter Ghost.]
HAMLET: Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee: I’ll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me!
Let me not burst in ignorance; but tell
Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death,
Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,
Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn’d,
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,
To cast thee up again. What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous; and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?
[Ghost beckons HAMLET.]
21
HORATIO: It beckons you to go away with it,
As if it some impartment did desire
To you alone.
MARCELLUS: Look, with what courteous action
It waves you to a more removed ground:
But do not go with it.
HORATIO: No, by no means.
HAMLET: It will not speak; then I will follow it.
HORATIO: Do not, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, what should be the fear?
I do not set my life in a pin’s fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?
It waves me forth again: I’ll follow it.
HORATIO: What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o’er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
 Hamlet, Act I, scene v
Without more motive, into every brain MARCELLUS: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath. HORATIO: Heaven will direct it.

HAMLET: It waves me still. MARCELLUS: Nay, let’s follow him.

Go on; I’ll follow thee.
[Exeunt.]
MARCELLUS: You shall not go, my lord.
SCENE V: Another part of the platform.
HAMLET: Hold off your hands.
[Enter GHOST and HAMLET.]
HORATIO: Be ruled; you shall not go.
HAMLET: Where wilt thou lead me? speak; I’ll go no further.
HAMLET: My fate cries out,
And makes each petty artery in this body Ghost: Mark me.
As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve.
Still am I call’d. Unhand me, gentlemen. HAMLET: I will.
By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!
I say, away! Go on; I’ll follow thee. Ghost: My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
[Exeunt Ghost and HAMLET.] Must render up myself.

HORATIO: He waxes desperate with imagination. HAMLET: Alas, poor ghost!

MARCELLUS: Let’s follow; ’tis not fit thus to obey him. Ghost: Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.
HORATIO: Have after. To what issue will this come?
22
 Hamlet, Act I, scene v
HAMLET: Speak; I am bound to hear.
Ghost: So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.
HAMLET: What?
Ghost: I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love—
HAMLET: O God!
Ghost: Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
HAMLET: Murder!
23
Ghost: Murder most foul, as in the best it is;
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
HAMLET: Haste me to know’t, that I, with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love,
May sweep to my revenge.
Ghost: I find thee apt;
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,
Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear:
’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life
Now wears his crown.
HAMLET: O my prophetic soul!
My uncle!
Ghost: Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,—
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
So to seduce!—won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen:
O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!
 Hamlet, Act I, scene v
From me, whose love was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the vow
I made to her in marriage, and to decline
Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor
To those of mine!
But virtue, as it never will be moved,
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
And prey on garbage.
But, soft! methinks I scent the morning air;
Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard,
My custom always of the afternoon,
Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,
With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,
And in the porches of my ears did pour
The leperous distilment; whose effect
Holds such an enmity with blood of man
That swift as quicksilver it courses through
The natural gates and alleys of the body,
And with a sudden vigor doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine;
And a most instant tetter bark’d about,
Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust,
All my smooth body.
Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand
24
Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch’d:
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head:
O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!
If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not;
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once!
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
And ‘gins to pale his uneffectual fire:
Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.
[Exit.]
HAMLET: O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?
And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart;
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
 Hamlet, Act I, scene v
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, HAMLET: Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come, bird, come.
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there; [Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS.]
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain, MARCELLUS: How is’t, my noble lord?
Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
O most pernicious woman! HORATIO: What news, my lord?
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
My tables,—meet it is I set it down, HAMLET: O, wonderful!
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain;
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark: HORATIO: Good my lord, tell it.

[Writing.] HAMLET: No; you’ll reveal it.

So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word; HORATIO: Not I, my lord, by heaven.
It is ‘Adieu, adieu! remember me.’
I have sworn ‘t. MARCELLUS: Nor I, my lord.

MARCELLUS & HORATIO: [Within] My lord, my lord,— HAMLET: How say you, then; would heart of man once
think it?
MARCELLUS: [Within] Lord Hamlet,— But you’ll be secret?

HORATIO: [Within] Heaven secure him! HORATIO & MARCELLUS: Ay, by heaven, my lord.

HAMLET: So be it! HAMLET: There’s ne’er a villain dwelling in all Denmark

But he’s an arrant knave.
HORATIO: [Within] Hillo, ho, ho, my lord!
25
 Hamlet, Act I, scene v
HORATIO: There needs no ghost, my lord, come from HORATIO: What is’t, my lord? we will.
the grave
To tell us this. HAMLET: Never make known what you have seen to-night.

HAMLET: Why, right; you are i’ the right; HORATIO & MARCELLUS: My lord, we will not.
And so, without more circumstance at all,
I hold it fit that we shake hands and part: HAMLET: Nay, but swear’t.
You, as your business and desire shall point you;
For every man has business and desire, HORATIO: In faith,
Such as it is; and for mine own poor part, My lord, not I.
Look you, I’ll go pray.
MARCELLUS: Nor I, my lord, in faith.
HORATIO: These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.
HAMLET: Upon my sword.
HAMLET: I’m sorry they offend you, heartily;
Yes, ‘faith heartily. MARCELLUS: We have sworn, my lord, already.

HORATIO: There’s no offence, my lord. HAMLET: Indeed, upon my sword, indeed.

HAMLET: Yes, by Saint Patrick, but there is, Horatio, Ghost: [Beneath] Swear.
And much offence too. Touching this vision here,
It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you: HAMLET: Ah, ha, boy! say’st thou so? art thou there,
For your desire to know what is between us, truepenny?
O’ermaster ‘t as you may. And now, good friends, Come on—you hear this fellow in the cellarage—
As you are friends, scholars and soldiers, Consent to swear.
Give me one poor request.
HORATIO: Propose the oath, my lord.
26
 Hamlet, Act I, scene v
HAMLET: Never to speak of this that you have seen,
Swear by my sword.
Ghost: [Beneath] Swear.
HAMLET: Hic et ubique? then we’ll shift our ground.
Come hither, gentlemen,
And lay your hands again upon my sword:
Never to speak of this that you have heard,
Swear by my sword.
Ghost: [Beneath] Swear.
HAMLET: Well said, old mole! canst work i’ the earth so fast?
A worthy pioner! Once more remove, good friends.
HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
HAMLET: And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
But come;
Here, as before, never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd soe’er I bear myself,
As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on,
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall,
27
With arms encumber’d thus, or this headshake,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase,
As ‘Well, well, we know,’ or ‘We could, an if we would,’
Or ‘If we list to speak,’ or ‘There be, an if they might,’
Or such ambiguous giving out, to note
That you know aught of me: this not to do,
So grace and mercy at your most need help you,
Swear.
Ghost: [Beneath] Swear.
HAMLET: Rest, rest, perturbed spirit!
[They swear.]
So, gentlemen,
With all my love I do commend me to you:
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do, to express his love and friending to you,
God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together;
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let’s go together.
[Exeunt.]
 Hamlet, Act II, scene i
ACT II
SCENE I: A room in POLONIUS’ house.
[Enter POLONIUS and REYNALDO.]
LORD POLONIUS: Give him this money and these notes,
Reynaldo.
REYNALDO: I will, my lord.
LORD POLONIUS: You shall do marvellous wisely, good
Reynaldo,
Before you visit him, to make inquire
Of his behavior.
REYNALDO: My lord, I did intend it.
LORD POLONIUS: Marry, well said; very well said.
Look you, sir,
Inquire me first what Danskers are in Paris;
And how, and who, what means, and where they keep,
What company, at what expense; and finding
By this encompassment and drift of question
That they do know my son, come you more nearer
Than your particular demands will touch it:
28
Take you, as ‘twere, some distant knowledge of him;
As thus, ‘I know his father and his friends,
And in part him: ‘ do you mark this, Reynaldo?
REYNALDO: Ay, very well, my lord.
LORD POLONIUS: ‘And in part him; but’ you may say
‘not well:
But, if ’t be he I mean, he’s very wild;
Addicted so and so:’ and there put on him
What forgeries you please; marry, none so rank
As may dishonor him; take heed of that;
But, sir, such wanton, wild and usual slips
As are companions noted and most known
To youth and liberty.
REYNALDO: As gaming, my lord.
LORD POLONIUS: Ay, or drinking, fencing, swearing,
quarrelling,
Drabbing: you may go so far.
REYNALDO: My lord, that would dishonor him.
LORD POLONIUS: ‘Faith, no; as you may season it in the
charge
You must not put another scandal on him,
 Hamlet, Act II, scene i
That he is open to incontinency; REYNALDO: Very good, my lord.
That’s not my meaning: but breathe his faults so quaintly
That they may seem the taints of liberty, LORD POLONIUS: And then, sir, does he this—he
The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind, does—what was I about to say? By the mass, I was about
A savageness in unreclaimed blood, to say something: where did I leave?
Of general assault.
REYNALDO: At ‘closes in the consequence,’ at ‘friend or
REYNALDO: But, my good lord,— so,’ and ‘gentleman.’

LORD POLONIUS: Wherefore should you do this?
REYNALDO: Ay, my lord,
I would know that.
LORD POLONIUS: Marry, sir, here’s my drift;
And I believe, it is a fetch of wit:
You laying these slight sullies on my son,
As ‘twere a thing a little soil’d i’ the working,
Mark you,
Your party in converse, him you would sound,
Having ever seen in the prenominate crimes
The youth you breathe of guilty, be assured
He closes with you in this consequence;
‘Good sir,’ or so, or ‘friend,’ or ‘gentleman,’
According to the phrase or the addition
Of man and country.
LORD POLONIUS: At ‘closes in the consequence,’ ay, marry;
He closes thus: ‘I know the gentleman;
I saw him yesterday, or t’ other day,
Or then, or then; with such, or such; and, as you say,
There was a’ gaming; there o’ertook in’s rouse;
There falling out at tennis:’ or perchance,
‘I saw him enter such a house of sale,’
Videlicet, a brothel, or so forth.
See you now;
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth:
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out:
So by my former lecture and advice,
Shall you my son. You have me, have you not?
REYNALDO: My lord, I have.

29
 Hamlet, Act II, scene i
LORD POLONIUS: God be wi’ you; fare you well. Ungarter’d, and down-gyved to his ancle;
Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other;
REYNALDO: Good my lord! And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
LORD POLONIUS: Observe his inclination in yourself. To speak of horrors,—he comes before me.

REYNALDO: I shall, my lord. LORD POLONIUS: Mad for thy love?

LORD POLONIUS: And let him ply his music.
REYNALDO: Well, my lord.
LORD POLONIUS: Farewell!
[Exit REYNALDO.]
[Enter OPHELIA.]
How now, Ophelia! what’s the matter?
OPHELIA: O, my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted!
LORD POLONIUS: With what, i’ the name of God?
OPHELIA: My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced;
No hat upon his head; his stockings foul’d,
30
OPHELIA: My lord, I do not know;
But truly, I do fear it.
LORD POLONIUS: What said he?
OPHELIA: He took me by the wrist and held me hard;
Then goes he to the length of all his arm;
And, with his other hand thus o’er his brow,
He falls to such perusal of my face
As he would draw it. Long stay’d he so;
At last, a little shaking of mine arm
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being: that done, he lets me go:
And, with his head over his shoulder turn’d,
He seem’d to find his way without his eyes;
For out o’ doors he went without their helps,
And, to the last, bended their light on me.
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
LORD POLONIUS: Come, go with me: I will go seek the
king.
This is the very ecstasy of love,
Whose violent property fordoes itself
And leads the will to desperate undertakings
As oft as any passion under heaven
That does afflict our natures. I am sorry.
What, have you given him any hard words of late?
OPHELIA: No, my good lord, but, as you did command,
I did repel his fetters and denied
His access to me.
LORD POLONIUS: That hath made him mad.
I am sorry that with better heed and judgment
I had not quoted him: I fear’d he did but trifle,
And meant to wreck thee; but, beshrew my jealousy!
By heaven, it is as proper to our age
To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions
As it is common for the younger sort
To lack discretion. Come, go we to the king:
This must be known; which, being kept close, might move
More grief to hide than hate to utter love.
[Exeunt.]
31
SCENE II: A room in the castle.
[Enter KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE,
ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, and Attendants.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern!
Moreover that we much did long to see you,
The need we have to use you did provoke
Our hasty sending. Something have you heard
Of Hamlet’s transformation; so call it,
Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was. What it should be,
More than his father’s death, that thus hath put him
So much from the understanding of himself,
I cannot dream of: I entreat you both,
That, being of so young days brought up with him,
And sith so neighbor’d to his youth and havior,
That you vouchsafe your rest here in our court
Some little time: so by your companies
To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather,
So much as from occasion you may glean,
Whether aught, to us unknown, afflicts him thus,
That, open’d, lies within our remedy.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Good gentlemen, he hath much
talk’d of you;
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

And sure I am two men there are not living GUILDENSTERN: Heavens make our presence and our
To whom he more adheres. If it will please you practices
To show us so much gentry and good will Pleasant and helpful to him!
As to expend your time with us awhile,
For the supply and profit of our hope, QUEEN GERTRUDE: Ay, amen!
Your visitation shall receive such thanks
As fits a king’s remembrance. [Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN, and some
Attendants.]
ROSENCRANTZ: Both your majesties
Might, by the sovereign power you have of us, [Enter POLONIUS.]
Put your dread pleasures more into command
Than to entreaty. LORD POLONIUS: The ambassadors from Norway, my
good lord,
GUILDENSTERN: But we both obey, Are joyfully return’d.
And here give up ourselves, in the full bent
To lay our service freely at your feet, KING CLAUDIUS: Thou still hast been the father of good
To be commanded. news.

KING CLAUDIUS: Thanks, Rosencrantz and gentle
Guildenstern.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Thanks, Guildenstern and gentle
Rosencrantz:
And I beseech you instantly to visit
My too much changed son. Go, some of you,
And bring these gentlemen where Hamlet is.
LORD POLONIUS: Have I, my lord? I assure my good
liege,
I hold my duty, as I hold my soul,
Both to my God and to my gracious king:
And I do think, or else this brain of mine
Hunts not the trail of policy so sure
As it hath used to do, that I have found
The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy.

32
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
KING CLAUDIUS: O, speak of that; that do I long to hear.
LORD POLONIUS: Give first admittance to the ambassadors;
My news shall be the fruit to that great feast.
KING CLAUDIUS: Thyself do grace to them, and bring
them in.
[Exit POLONIUS.]
He tells me, my dear Gertrude, he hath found
The head and source of all your son’s distemper.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: I doubt it is no other but the main;
His father’s death, and our o’erhasty marriage.
KING CLAUDIUS: Well, we shall sift him.
[Re-enter POLONIUS, with VOLTIMAND and
CORNELIUS.]
Welcome, my good friends!
Say, Voltimand, what from our brother Norway?
VOLTIMAND: Most fair return of greetings and desires.
Upon our first, he sent out to suppress
His nephew’s levies; which to him appear’d
33
To be a preparation ‘gainst the Polack;
But, better look’d into, he truly found
It was against your highness: whereat grieved,
That so his sickness, age and impotence
Was falsely borne in hand, sends out arrests
On Fortinbras; which he, in brief, obeys;
Receives rebuke from Norway, and in fine
Makes vow before his uncle never more
To give the assay of arms against your majesty.
Whereon old Norway, overcome with joy,
Gives him three thousand crowns in annual fee,
And his commission to employ those soldiers,
So levied as before, against the Polack:
With an entreaty, herein further shown,
[Giving a paper.]
That it might please you to give quiet pass
Through your dominions for this enterprise,
On such regards of safety and allowance
As therein are set down.
KING CLAUDIUS: It likes us well;
And at our more consider’d time well read,
Answer, and think upon this business.
Meantime we thank you for your well-took labor:
Go to your rest; at night we’ll feast together:
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
Most welcome home!
[Exeunt VOLTIMAND and CORNELIUS.]
LORD POLONIUS: This business is well ended.
My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: More matter, with less art.
LORD POLONIUS: Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he is mad, ’tis true: ’tis true ’tis pity;
And pity ’tis ’tis true: a foolish figure;
But farewell it, for I will use no art.
Mad let us grant him, then: and now remains
That we find out the cause of this effect,
Or rather say, the cause of this defect,
For this effect defective comes by cause:
Thus it remains, and the remainder thus.
34
Perpend.
I have a daughter—have while she is mine—
Who, in her duty and obedience, mark,
Hath given me this: now gather, and surmise.
[Reads.]
‘To the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautified
Ophelia,’— That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase; ‘beautified’
is a vile phrase: but you shall hear. Thus:
[Reads.]
‘In her excellent white bosom, these, &c.’
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Came this from Hamlet to her?
LORD POLONIUS: Good madam, stay awhile; I will be
faithful.
[Reads.]
‘Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
‘O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers;
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
I have not art to reckon my groans: but that
I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu.
‘Thine evermore most dear lady, whilst this machine is
to him, HAMLET.’
This, in obedience, hath my daughter shown me,
And more above, hath his solicitings,
As they fell out by time, by means and place,
All given to mine ear.
KING CLAUDIUS: But how hath she
Received his love?
LORD POLONIUS: What do you think of me?
KING CLAUDIUS: As of a man faithful and honorable.
LORD POLONIUS: I would fain prove so. But what might
you think,
When I had seen this hot love on the wing—
As I perceived it, I must tell you that,
Before my daughter told me—what might you,
Or my dear majesty your queen here, think,
If I had play’d the desk or table-book,
Or given my heart a winking, mute and dumb,
Or look’d upon this love with idle sight;
What might you think? No, I went round to work,
35
And my young mistress thus I did bespeak:
‘Lord Hamlet is a prince, out of thy star;
This must not be:’ and then I precepts gave her,
That she should lock herself from his resort,
Admit no messengers, receive no tokens.
Which done, she took the fruits of my advice;
And he, repulsed—a short tale to make—
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,
Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,
Into the madness wherein now he raves,
And all we mourn for.
KING CLAUDIUS: Do you think ’tis this?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: It may be, very likely.
LORD POLONIUS: Hath there been such a time—I’d
fain know that—
That I have positively said “Tis so,’
When it proved otherwise?
KING CLAUDIUS: Not that I know.
LORD POLONIUS: [Pointing to his head and shoulder.]
Take this from this, if this be otherwise:
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

If circumstances lead me, I will find [Exeunt KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE, and
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed Attendants.]
Within the centre.
[Enter HAMLET, reading.]
KING CLAUDIUS: How may we try it further?
O, give me leave:
LORD POLONIUS: You know, sometimes he walks four How does my good Lord Hamlet?
hours together
Here in the lobby. HAMLET: Well, God-a-mercy.

QUEEN GERTRUDE: So he does indeed. LORD POLONIUS: Do you know me, my lord?

LORD POLONIUS: At such a time I’ll loose my daughter HAMLET: Excellent well; you are a fishmonger.
to him:
Be you and I behind an arras then; LORD POLONIUS: Not I, my lord.
Mark the encounter: if he love her not
And be not from his reason fall’n thereon, HAMLET: Then I would you were so honest a man.
Let me be no assistant for a state,
But keep a farm and carters. LORD POLONIUS: Honest, my lord!

KING CLAUDIUS: We will try it. HAMLET: Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be
one man picked out of ten thousand.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: But, look, where sadly the poor
wretch comes reading. LORD POLONIUS: That’s very true, my lord.

LORD POLONIUS: Away, I do beseech you, both away: HAMLET: For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog,
I’ll board him presently. being a god kissing carrion,—Have you a daughter?
36
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
LORD POLONIUS: I have, my lord.
HAMLET: Let her not walk i’ the sun: conception is a
blessing: but not as your daughter may conceive. Friend,
look to ‘t.
LORD POLONIUS: [Aside] How say you by that? Still
harping on my daughter: yet he knew me not at first; he
said I was a fishmonger: he is far gone, far gone: and truly
in my youth I suffered much extremity for love; very near
this. I’ll speak to him again. What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET: Words, words, words.
LORD POLONIUS: What is the matter, my lord?
HAMLET: Between who?
LORD POLONIUS: I mean, the matter that you read, my
lord.
HAMLET: Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here
that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled,
their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum and that
they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak
hams: all which, sir, though I most powerfully and po-
tently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set
37
down, for yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab
you could go backward.
LORD POLONIUS: [Aside] Though this be madness, yet
there is method in ‘t. Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
HAMLET: Into my grave.
LORD POLONIUS: Indeed, that is out o’ the air.
[Aside.]
How pregnant sometimes his replies are! a happiness that
often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not
so prosperously be delivered of. I will leave him, and sud-
denly contrive the means of meeting between him and my
daughter.—My honorable lord, I will most humbly take
my leave of you.
HAMLET: You cannot, sir, take from me any thing that I
will more willingly part withal: except my life, except my
life, except my life.
LORD POLONIUS: Fare you well, my lord.
HAMLET: These tedious old fools!
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
[Enter ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
LORD POLONIUS: You go to seek the Lord Hamlet; there
he is.
ROSENCRANTZ: [To POLONIUS] God save you, sir!
[Exit POLONIUS.]
GUILDENSTERN: My honored lord!
ROSENCRANTZ: My most dear lord!
HAMLET: My excellent good friends! How dost thou,
Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do ye both?
ROSENCRANTZ: As the indifferent children of the earth.
GUILDENSTERN: Happy, in that we are not over-happy;
On fortune’s cap we are not the very button.
HAMLET: Nor the soles of her shoe?
ROSENCRANTZ: Neither, my lord.
HAMLET: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle
of her favors?
38
GUILDENSTERN: ‘Faith, her privates we.
HAMLET: In the secret parts of fortune? O, most true; she
is a strumpet. What’s the news?
ROSENCRANTZ: None, my lord, but that the world’s
grown honest.
HAMLET: Then is doomsday near: but your news is not
true. Let me question more in particular: what have you,
my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune, that she
sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord!
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one.
HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many con-
fines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ: We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then, ’tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a
prison.
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
ROSENCRANTZ: Why then, your ambition makes it one;
’tis too narrow for your mind.
HAMLET: O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and
count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have
bad dreams.
GUILDENSTERN: Which dreams indeed are ambition,
for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow
of a dream.
HAMLET: A dream itself is but a shadow.
ROSENCRANTZ: Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy
and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
HAMLET: Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs
and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows. Shall we to
the court? for, by my fay, I cannot reason.
ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN: We’ll wait upon
you.
HAMLET: No such matter: I will not sort you with the
rest of my servants, for, to speak to you like an honest man,
I am most dreadfully attended. But, in the beaten way of
friendship, what make you at Elsinore?
39
ROSENCRANTZ: To visit you, my lord; no other occa-
sion.
HAMLET: Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but
I thank you: and sure, dear friends, my thanks are too dear
a halfpenny. Were you not sent for? Is it your own inclining?
Is it a free visitation? Come, deal justly with me: come,
come; nay, speak.
GUILDENSTERN: What should we say, my lord?
HAMLET: Why, any thing, but to the purpose. You were
sent for; and there is a kind of confession in your looks
which your modesties have not craft enough to color: I know
the good king and queen have sent for you.
ROSENCRANTZ: To what end, my lord?
HAMLET: That you must teach me. But let me conjure
you, by the rights of our fellowship, by the consonancy of
our youth, by the obligation of our ever-preserved love, and
by what more dear a better proposer could charge you withal,
be even and direct with me, whether you were sent for, or
no?
ROSENCRANTZ: [Aside to GUILDENSTERN] What say
you?
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
HAMLET: [Aside] Nay, then, I have an eye of you.—If you
love me, hold not off.
GUILDENSTERN: My lord, we were sent for.
HAMLET: I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation
prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the king and
queen moult no feather. I have of late—but wherefore I know
not— lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and
indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly
frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why,
it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! how
noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and mov-
ing how express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quin-
tessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman nei-
ther, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
ROSENCRANTZ: My lord, there was no such stuff in my
thoughts.
HAMLET: Why did you laugh then, when I said ‘man de-
lights not me’?
40
ROSENCRANTZ: To think, my lord, if you delight not in
man, what lenten entertainment the players shall receive from
you: we coted them on the way; and hither are they com-
ing, to offer you service.
HAMLET: He that plays the king shall be welcome; his
majesty shall have tribute of me; the adventurous knight
shall use his foil and target; the lover shall not sigh gratis;
the humorous man shall end his part in peace; the clown
shall make those laugh whose lungs are tickled o’ the sere;
and the lady shall say her mind freely, or the blank verse
shall halt for’t. What players are they?
ROSENCRANTZ: Even those you were wont to take de-
light in, the tragedians of the city.
HAMLET: How chances it they travel? their residence, both
in reputation and profit, was better both ways.
ROSENCRANTZ: I think their inhibition comes by the
means of the late innovation.
HAMLET: Do they hold the same estimation they did when
I was in the city? are they so followed?
ROSENCRANTZ: No, indeed, are they not.
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
HAMLET: How comes it? do they grow rusty?
ROSENCRANTZ: Nay, their endeavor keeps in the wonted
pace: but there is, sir, an aery of children, little eyases, that
cry out on the top of question, and are most tyrannically
clapped for’t: these are now the fashion, and so berattle the
common stages—so they call them—that many wearing
rapiers are afraid of goose-quills and dare scarce come thither.
HAMLET: What, are they children? who maintains ‘em?
how are they escoted? Will they pursue the quality no longer
than they can sing? will they not say afterwards, if they should
grow themselves to common players—as it is most like, if
their means are no better—their writers do them wrong, to
make them exclaim against their own succession?
ROSENCRANTZ: ‘Faith, there has been much to do on
both sides; and the nation holds it no sin to tarre them to
controversy: there was, for a while, no money bid for argu-
ment, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the
question.
HAMLET: Is’t possible?
GUILDENSTERN: O, there has been much throwing
about of brains.
41
HAMLET: Do the boys carry it away?
ROSENCRANTZ: Ay, that they do, my lord; Hercules and
his load too.
HAMLET: It is not very strange; for mine uncle is king of
Denmark, and those that would make mows at him while
my father lived, give twenty, forty, fifty, an hundred ducats
a-piece for his picture in little. ‘Sblood, there is something
in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.
[Flourish of trumpets within.]
GUILDENSTERN: There are the players.
HAMLET: Gentlemen, you are welcome to Elsinore. Your
hands, come then: the appurtenance of welcome is fashion
and ceremony: let me comply with you in this garb, lest my
extent to the players, which, I tell you, must show fairly
outward, should more appear like entertainment than yours.
You are welcome: but my uncle-father and aunt-mother are
deceived.
GUILDENSTERN: In what, my dear lord?
HAMLET: I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind
is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
[Enter POLONIUS.]
LORD POLONIUS: Well be with you, gentlemen!
HAMLET: Hark you, Guildenstern; and you too: at each
ear a hearer: that great baby you see there is not yet out of
his swaddling-clouts.
ROSENCRANTZ: Happily he’s the second time come to
them; for they say an old man is twice a child.
HAMLET: I will prophesy he comes to tell me of the play-
ers; mark it. You say right, sir: o’ Monday morning; ’twas so
indeed.
LORD POLONIUS: My lord, I have news to tell you.
HAMLET: My lord, I have news to tell you.
When Roscius was an actor in Rome,—
LORD POLONIUS: The actors are come hither, my lord.
HAMLET: Buz, buz!
LORD POLONIUS: Upon mine honor,—
HAMLET: Then came each actor on his ass,—
42
LORD POLONIUS: The best actors in the world, either
for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, his-
torical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-histori-
cal-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca
cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of
writ and the liberty, these are the only men.
HAMLET: O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst
thou!
LORD POLONIUS: What a treasure had he, my lord?
HAMLET: Why,
‘One fair daughter and no more,
The which he loved passing well.’
LORD POLONIUS: [Aside] Still on my daughter.
HAMLET: Am I not i’ the right, old Jephthah?
LORD POLONIUS: If you call me Jephthah, my lord, I
have a daughter that I love passing well.
HAMLET: Nay, that follows not.
LORD POLONIUS: What follows, then, my lord?
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
HAMLET: Why,
‘As by lot, God wot,’
and then, you know,
‘It came to pass, as most like it was,’—
the first row of the pious chanson will show you more; for
look, where my abridgement comes.
[Enter four or five Players.]
You are welcome, masters; welcome, all. I am glad to see
thee well. Welcome, good friends. O, my old friend! thy
face is valenced since I saw thee last: comest thou to beard
me in Denmark? What, my young lady and mistress! By’r
lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you
last, by the altitude of a chopine. Pray God, your voice, like
apiece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked within the ring.
Masters, you are all welcome. We’ll e’en to’t like French
falconers, fly at any thing we see: we’ll have a speech straight:
come, give us a taste of your quality; come, a passionate
speech.
First Player: What speech, my lord?
HAMLET: I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was
never acted; or, if it was, not above once; for the play, I
remember, pleased not the million; ’twas caviare to the gen-
eral: but it was—as I received it, and others, whose judg-
43
ments in such matters cried in the top of mine—an excel-
lent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much
modesty as cunning. I remember, one said there were no
sallets in the lines to make the matter savory, nor no matter
in the phrase that might indict the author of affectation; but
called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by
very much more handsome than fine. One speech in it I
chiefly loved: ’twas Aeneas’ tale to Dido; and thereabout of
it especially, where he speaks of Priam’s slaughter: if it live
in your memory, begin at this line: let me see, let me see—
‘The rugged Pyrrhus, like the Hyrcanian beast,’—it
is not so: —it begins with Pyrrhus:—
‘The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse,
Hath now this dread and black complexion smear’d
With heraldry more dismal; head to foot
Now is he total gules; horridly trick’d
With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons,
Baked and impasted with the parching streets,
That lend a tyrannous and damned light
To their lord’s murder: roasted in wrath and fire,
And thus o’er-sized with coagulate gore,
With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus
Old grandsire Priam seeks.’
So, proceed you.
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
LORD POLONIUS: ‘Fore God, my lord, well spoken, with
good accent and good discretion.
First Player: ‘Anon he finds him
Striking too short at Greeks; his antique sword,
Rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls,
Repugnant to command: unequal match’d,
Pyrrhus at Priam drives; in rage strikes wide;
But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword
The unnerved father falls. Then senseless Ilium,
Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top
Stoops to his base, and with a hideous crash
Takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear: for, lo! his sword,
Which was declining on the milky head
Of reverend Priam, seem’d i’ the air to stick:
So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood,
And like a neutral to his will and matter,
Did nothing.
But, as we often see, against some storm,
A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,
The bold winds speechless and the orb below
As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder
Doth rend the region, so, after Pyrrhus’ pause,
Aroused vengeance sets him new a-work;
And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall
On Mars’s armor forged for proof eterne
With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword
44
Now falls on Priam.
Out, out, thou strumpet, Fortune! All you gods,
In general synod ‘take away her power;
Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,
And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven,
As low as to the fiends!’
LORD POLONIUS: This is too long.
HAMLET: It shall to the barber’s, with your beard. Prithee,
say on: he’s for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps: say on:
come to Hecuba.
First Player: ‘But who, O, who had seen the mobled queen—’
HAMLET: ‘The mobled queen?’
LORD POLONIUS: That’s good; ‘mobled queen’ is good.
First Player: ‘Run barefoot up and down, threatening
the flames
With bisson rheum; a clout upon that head
Where late the diadem stood, and for a robe,
About her lank and all o’er-teemed loins,
A blanket, in the alarm of fear caught up;
Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep’d,
‘Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounced:
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

But if the gods themselves did see her then
When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport
In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs,
The instant burst of clamor that she made,
Unless things mortal move them not at all,
Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven,
And passion in the gods.’
HAMLET: Follow him, friends: we’ll hear a play to-mor-
row.
[Exit POLONIUS with all the Players but the First.]
Dost thou hear me, old friend; can you play the
Murder of Gonzago?

LORD POLONIUS: Look, whether he has not turned his First Player: Ay, my lord.
color and has tears in’s eyes. Pray you, no more.
HAMLET: We’ll ha’t to-morrow night. You could, for a
HAMLET: ’Tis well: I’ll have thee speak out the rest soon. need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which
Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do I would set down and insert in’t, could you not?
you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and
brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were bet- First Player: Ay, my lord.
ter have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
HAMLET: Very well. Follow that lord; and look you mock
LORD POLONIUS: My lord, I will use them according to him not.
their desert.
[Exit First Player.]
HAMLET: God’s bodykins, man, much better: use every
man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping? Use My good friends, I’ll leave you till night: you are welcome
them after your own honor and dignity: the less they de- to Elsinore.
serve, the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in.
ROSENCRANTZ: Good my lord!
LORD POLONIUS: Come, sirs.
HAMLET: Ay, so, God be wi’ ye;
45
 Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn’d defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
46
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i’ the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? who does me this?
Ha!
‘Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver’d and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave’s offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder’d,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
A scullion!
Fie upon’t! foh! About, my brain! I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim’d their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,
 Hamlet, Act III, scene i
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I’ll have grounds
More relative than this: the play ‘s the thing
Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
[Exit.]
ACT III
SCENE I: A room in the castle.
[Enter KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE,
P O LO N I U S , O PH E L I A , R O S E N C R A N T Z , a n d
GUILDENSTERN.]
KING CLAUDIUS: And can you, by no drift of circumstance,
Get from him why he puts on this confusion,
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?
ROSENCRANTZ: He does confess he feels himself distracted;
But from what cause he will by no means speak.
47
GUILDENSTERN: Nor do we find him forward to be sounded,
But, with a crafty madness, keeps aloof,
When we would bring him on to some confession
Of his true state.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Did he receive you well?
ROSENCRANTZ: Most like a gentleman.
GUILDENSTERN: But with much forcing of his disposition.
ROSENCRANTZ: Niggard of question; but, of our demands,
Most free in his reply.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Did you assay him?
To any pastime?
ROSENCRANTZ: Madam, it so fell out, that certain
players
We o’er-raught on the way: of these we told him;
And there did seem in him a kind of joy
To hear of it: they are about the court,
And, as I think, they have already order
This night to play before him.
LORD POLONIUS: ’Tis most true:
And he beseech’d me to entreat your majesties
 Hamlet, Act III, scene i
To hear and see the matter. Will bring him to his wonted way again,
To both your honors.
KING CLAUDIUS: With all my heart; and it doth much
content me OPHELIA: Madam, I wish it may.
To hear him so inclined.
Good gentlemen, give him a further edge, [Exit QUEEN GERTRUDE.]
And drive his purpose on to these delights.
LORD POLONIUS: Ophelia, walk you here. Gracious,
ROSENCRANTZ: We shall, my lord. so please you,
We will bestow ourselves.
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
[To OPHELIA.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Sweet Gertrude, leave us too;
For we have closely sent for Hamlet hither, Read on this book;
That he, as ‘twere by accident, may here That show of such an exercise may color
Affront Ophelia: Your loneliness. We are oft to blame in this,—
Her father and myself, lawful espials, ’Tis too much proved—that with devotion’s visage
Will so bestow ourselves that, seeing, unseen, And pious action we do sugar o’er
We may of their encounter frankly judge, The devil himself.
And gather by him, as he is behaved,
If ‘t be the affliction of his love or no KING CLAUDIUS: [Aside] O, ’tis too true!
That thus he suffers for. How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plastering art,
QUEEN GERTRUDE: I shall obey you. Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish Than is my deed to my most painted word:
That your good beauties be the happy cause O heavy burthen!
Of Hamlet’s wildness: so shall I hope your virtues
48
 Hamlet, Act III, scene i
LORD POLONIUS: I hear him coming: let’s withdraw,
my lord.
[Exeunt KING CLAUDIUS and POLONIUS.]
[Enter HAMLET.]
HAMLET: To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
49
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.
OPHELIA: Good my lord,
How does your honor for this many a day?
HAMLET: I humbly thank you; well, well, well.
OPHELIA: My lord, I have remembrances of yours,
That I have longed long to re-deliver;
I pray you, now receive them.
HAMLET: No, not I;
I never gave you aught.
 Hamlet, Act III, scene i
OPHELIA: My honor’d lord, you know right well you did;
And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed
As made the things more rich: their perfume lost,
Take these again; for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
There, my lord.
HAMLET: Ha, ha! are you honest?
OPHELIA: My lord?
HAMLET: Are you fair?
OPHELIA: What means your lordship?
HAMLET: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty
should admit no discourse to your beauty.
OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce
than with honesty?
HAMLET: Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner
transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force
of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness: this was
sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did
love you once.
50
OPHELIA: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
HAMLET: You should not have believed me; for virtue can-
not so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it: I
loved you not.
OPHELIA: I was the more deceived.
HAMLET: Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I
could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother
had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious,
with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put
them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them
in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth
and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.
Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father?
OPHELIA: At home, my lord.
HAMLET: Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may
play the fool no where but in’s own house. Farewell.
OPHELIA: O, help him, you sweet heavens!
HAMLET: If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for
thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou
 Hamlet, Act III, scene i
shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go: fare-
well. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise
men know well enough what monsters you make of them.
To a nunnery, go, and quickly too. Farewell.
OPHELIA: O heavenly powers, restore him!
HAMLET: I have heard of your paintings too, well enough;
God has given you one face, and you make yourselves an-
other: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nick-name God’s
creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance. Go
to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad. I say, we will
have no more marriages: those that are married already, all
but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a nun-
nery, go.
[Exit.]
OPHELIA: O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck’d the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
51
That unmatch’d form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
[Re-enter KING CLAUDIUS and POLONIUS.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Love! his affections do not that way
tend;
Nor what he spake, though it lack’d form a little,
Was not like madness. There’s something in his soul,
O’er which his melancholy sits on brood;
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger: which for to prevent,
I have in quick determination
Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England,
For the demand of our neglected tribute
Haply the seas and countries different
With variable objects shall expel
This something-settled matter in his heart,
Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus
From fashion of himself. What think you on’t?
LORD POLONIUS: It shall do well: but yet do I believe
The origin and commencement of his grief
Sprung from neglected love. How now, Ophelia!
You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said;
We heard it all. My lord, do as you please;
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
But, if you hold it fit, after the play
Let his queen mother all alone entreat him
To show his grief: let her be round with him;
And I’ll be placed, so please you, in the ear
Of all their conference. If she find him not,
To England send him, or confine him where
Your wisdom best shall think.
KING CLAUDIUS: It shall be so:
Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go.
[Exeunt.]
SCENE II: A hall in the castle.
[Enter HAMLET and Players.]
HAMLET: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it
to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as
many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke
my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand,
thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and,
as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and
beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it of-
fends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fel-
low tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of
the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of noth-
52
ing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have
such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant; it out-herods
Herod: pray you, avoid it.
First Player: I warrant your honor.
HAMLET: Be not too tame neither, but let your own dis-
cretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word
to the action; with this special o’erstep not the modesty of
nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of
playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to
hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her
own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and
body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone,
or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, can-
not but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which
one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of
others. O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard
others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that,
neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Chris-
tian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I
have thought some of nature’s journeymen had made men
and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abomi-
nably.
First Player: I hope we have reformed that indifferently with
us, sir.
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
HAMLET: O, reform it altogether. And let those that play
your clowns speak no more than is set down for them; for
there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some
quantity of barren spectators to laugh too; though, in the
mean time, some necessary question of the play be then to
be considered: that’s villanous, and shows a most pitiful
ambition in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.
[Exeunt Players.]
[Enter POLONIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, and GUILDENSTERN.]
How now, my lord! I will the king hear this piece of work?
LORD POLONIUS: And the queen too, and that presently.
HAMLET: Bid the players make haste.
[Exit POLONIUS.]
Will you two help to hasten them?
ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN: We will, my lord.
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
HAMLET: What ho! Horatio!
53
[Enter HORATIO.]
HORATIO: Here, sweet lord, at your service.
HAMLET: Horatio, thou art e’en as just a man
As e’er my conversation coped withal.
HORATIO: O, my dear lord,—
HAMLET: Nay, do not think I flatter;
For what advancement may I hope from thee
That no revenue hast but thy good spirits,
To feed and clothe thee? Why should the poor be flatter’d?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning. Dost thou hear?
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice
And could of men distinguish, her election
Hath seal’d thee for herself; for thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards
Hast ta’en with equal thanks: and blest are those
Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
As I do thee.—Something too much of this.—
There is a play to-night before the king;
One scene of it comes near the circumstance
Which I have told thee of my father’s death:
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe mine uncle: if his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note;
For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,
And after we will both our judgments join
In censure of his seeming.
HORATIO: Well, my lord:
If he steal aught the whilst this play is playing,
And ‘scape detecting, I will pay the theft.
HAMLET: They are coming to the play; I must be idle:
Get you a place.
[Danish march. A flourish. Enter KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN
GERTRUDE, POLONIUS, OPHELIA, ROSENCRANTZ,
GUILDENSTERN, and others.]
KING CLAUDIUS: How fares our cousin Hamlet?
54
HAMLET: Excellent, i’ faith; of the chameleon’s dish: I eat
the air, promise-crammed: you cannot feed capons so.
KING CLAUDIUS: I have nothing with this answer,
Hamlet; these words are not mine.
HAMLET: No, nor mine now.
[To POLONIUS.]
My lord, you played once i’ the university, you say?
LORD POLONIUS: That did I, my lord; and was accounted
a good actor.
HAMLET: What did you enact?
LORD POLONIUS: I did enact Julius Caesar: I was
killed i’ the
Capitol; Brutus killed me.
HAMLET: It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf
there. Be the players ready?
ROSENCRANTZ: Ay, my lord; they stay upon your patience.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Come hither, my dear Hamlet,
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
sit by me. OPHELIA: You are merry, my lord.

HAMLET: No, good mother, here’s metal more attractive. HAMLET: Who, I?

LORD POLONIUS: [To KING CLAUDIUS] O, ho! do OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.

you mark that?
HAMLET: O God, your only jig-maker. What should a
HAMLET: Lady, shall I lie in your lap? man do but be merry? for, look you, how cheerfully my
mother looks, and my father died within these two hours.
[Lying down at OPHELIA’s feet.]
OPHELIA: Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.
OPHELIA: No, my lord.
HAMLET: So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for
HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap? I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens! die two months ago, and
not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory
OPHELIA: Ay, my lord. may outlive his life half a year: but, by’r lady, he must build
churches, then; or else shall he suffer not thinking on, with
HAMLET: Do you think I meant country matters? the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is ‘For, O, for, O, the hobby-
horse is forgot.’
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.
[Hautboys play. The dumb-show enters.]
HAMLET: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
[Enter a King and a Queen very lovingly; the Queen embracing
OPHELIA: What is, my lord? him, and he her. She kneels, and makes show of protestation
unto him. He takes her up, and declines his head upon her
HAMLET: Nothing. neck: lays him down upon a bank of flowers: she, seeing him
asleep, leaves him. Anon comes in a fellow, takes off his crown,
55
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
kisses it, and pours poison in the King’s ears, and exit. The
Queen returns; finds the King dead, and makes passionate ac-
tion. The Poisoner, with some two or three Mutes, comes in
again, seeming to lament with her. The dead body is carried
away. The Poisoner wooes the Queen with gifts: she seems loath
and unwilling awhile, but in the end accepts his love.]
[Exeunt.]
OPHELIA: What means this, my lord?
HAMLET: Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief.
OPHELIA: Belike this show imports the argument of the play.
[Enter Prologue.]
HAMLET: We shall know by this fellow: the players can-
not keep counsel; they’ll tell all.
OPHELIA: Will he tell us what this show meant?
HAMLET: Ay, or any show that you’ll show him: be not
you ashamed to show, he’ll not shame to tell you what it
means.
OPHELIA: You are naught, you are naught: I’ll mark the
56
play.
Prologue: For us, and for our tragedy,
Here stooping to your clemency,
We beg your hearing patiently.
[Exit.]
HAMLET: Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?
OPHELIA: ’Tis brief, my lord.
HAMLET: As woman’s love.
[Enter two Players, King and Queen.]
Player King: Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart gone
round
Neptune’s salt wash and Tellus’ orbed ground,
And thirty dozen moons with borrow’d sheen
About the world have times twelve thirties been,
Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands
Unite commutual in most sacred bands.
Player Queen: So many journeys may the sun and moon
Make us again count o’er ere love be done!
But, woe is me, you are so sick of late,
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
So far from cheer and from your former state,
That I distrust you. Yet, though I distrust,
Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must:
For women’s fear and love holds quantity;
In neither aught, or in extremity.
Now, what my love is, proof hath made you know;
And as my love is sized, my fear is so:
Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear;
Where little fears grow great, great love grows there.
Player King: ‘Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too;
My operant powers their functions leave to do:
And thou shalt live in this fair world behind,
Honor’d, beloved; and haply one as kind
For husband shalt thou—
Player Queen: O, confound the rest!
Such love must needs be treason in my breast:
In second husband let me be accurst!
None wed the second but who kill’d the first.
HAMLET: [Aside] Wormwood, wormwood.
Player Queen: The instances that second marriage move
Are base respects of thrift, but none of love:
A second time I kill my husband dead,
When second husband kisses me in bed.
57
Player King: I do believe you think what now you speak;
But what we do determine oft we break.
Purpose is but the slave to memory,
Of violent birth, but poor validity;
Which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree;
But fall, unshaken, when they mellow be.
Most necessary ’tis that we forget
To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt:
What to ourselves in passion we propose,
The passion ending, doth the purpose lose.
The violence of either grief or joy
Their own enactures with themselves destroy:
Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament;
Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident.
This world is not for aye, nor ’tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change;
For ’tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.
The great man down, you mark his favorite flies;
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies.
And hitherto doth love on fortune tend;
For who not needs shall never lack a friend,
And who in want a hollow friend doth try,
Directly seasons him his enemy.
But, orderly to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own:
So think thou wilt no second husband wed;
But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.
Player Queen: Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven
light!
Sport and repose lock from me day and night!
To desperation turn my trust and hope!
An anchor’s cheer in prison be my scope!
Each opposite that blanks the face of joy
Meet what I would have well and it destroy!
Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife,
If, once a widow, ever I be wife!
HAMLET: If she should break it now!
Player King: ’Tis deeply sworn. Sweet, leave me here awhile;
My spirits grow dull, and fain I would beguile
The tedious day with sleep.
[Sleeps.]
Player Queen: Sleep rock thy brain,
And never come mischance between us twain!
[Exit.]
58
HAMLET: Madam, how like you this play?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: The lady protests too much,
methinks.
HAMLET: O, but she’ll keep her word.
KING CLAUDIUS: Have you heard the argument? Is
there no offence in ‘t?
HAMLET: No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest; no
offence i’ the world.
KING CLAUDIUS: What do you call the play?
HAMLET: The Mouse-trap. Marry, how? Tropically. This
play is the image of a murder done in Vienna: Gonzago is
the duke’s name; his wife, Baptista: you shall see anon; ’tis a
knavish piece of work: but what o’ that? your majesty and
we that have free souls, it touches us not: let the galled jade
wince, our withers are unwrung.
[Enter LUCIANUS.]
This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king.
OPHELIA: You are as good as a chorus, my lord.
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
HAMLET: I could interpret between you and your love, if
I could see the puppets dallying.
OPHELIA: You are keen, my lord, you are keen.
HAMLET: It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.
OPHELIA: Still better, and worse.
HAMLET: So you must take your husbands. Begin, mur-
derer; pox, leave thy damnable faces, and begin. Come: ‘the
croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.’
LUCIANUS: Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and
time agreeing;
Confederate season, else no creature seeing;
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property,
On wholesome life usurp immediately.
[Pours the poison into the sleeper’s ears.]
OPHELIA: The king rises.
HAMLET: What, frighted with false fire!
QUEEN GERTRUDE: How fares my lord?
LORD POLONIUS: Give o’er the play.
KING CLAUDIUS: Give me some light: away!
All: Lights, lights, lights!
[Exeunt all but HAMLET and HORATIO.]
HAMLET: Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
So runs the world away.
Would not this, sir, and a forest of feathers— if the rest of
my fortunes turn Turk with me—with two Provincial roses
on my razed shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players,
sir?

HAMLET: He poisons him i’ the garden for’s estate. His HORATIO: Half a share.
name’s Gonzago: the story is extant, and writ in choice Ital-
ian: you shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of HAMLET: A whole one, I.
Gonzago’s wife. For thou dost know, O Damon dear,
59
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
This realm dismantled was GUILDENSTERN: The king, sir,—
Of Jove himself; and now reigns here
A very, very—pajock. HAMLET: Ay, sir, what of him?

HORATIO: You might have rhymed. GUILDENSTERN: Is in his retirement marvellous distempered.

HAMLET: O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a
thousand pound. Didst perceive?
HORATIO: Very well, my lord.
HAMLET: Upon the talk of the poisoning?
HORATIO: I did very well note him.
HAMLET: Ah, ha! Come, some music! come, the record-
ers!
For if the king like not the comedy,
Why then, belike, he likes it not, perdy.
Come, some music!
[Re-enter ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
GUILDENSTERN: Good my lord, vouchsafe me a word
with you.
HAMLET: Sir, a whole history.
60
HAMLET: With drink, sir?
GUILDENSTERN: No, my lord, rather with choler.
HAMLET: Your wisdom should show itself more richer to
signify this to his doctor; for, for me to put him to his pur-
gation would perhaps plunge him into far more choler.
GUILDENSTERN: Good my lord, put your discourse into
some frame and start not so wildly from my affair.
HAMLET: I am tame, sir: pronounce.
GUILDENSTERN: The queen, your mother, in most great
affliction of spirit, hath sent me to you.
HAMLET: You are welcome.
GUILDENSTERN: Nay, good my lord, this courtesy is
not of the right breed. If it shall please you to make me a
wholesome answer, I will do your mother’s commandment:
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
if not, your pardon and my return shall be the end of my
business.
HAMLET: Sir, I cannot.
GUILDENSTERN: What, my lord?
HAMLET: Make you a wholesome answer; my wit’s dis-
eased: but, sir, such answer as I can make, you shall com-
mand; or, rather, as you say, my mother: therefore no more,
but to the matter: my mother, you say,—
ROSENCRANTZ: Then thus she says; your behavior hath
struck her into amazement and admiration.
HAMLET: O wonderful son, that can so astonish a mother!
But is there no sequel at the heels of this mother’s admira-
tion? Impart.
ROSENCRANTZ: She desires to speak with you in her
closet, ere you go to bed.
HAMLET: We shall obey, were she ten times our mother.
Have you any further trade with us?
ROSENCRANTZ: My lord, you once did love me.
61
HAMLET: So I do still, by these pickers and stealers.
ROSENCRANTZ: Good my lord, what is your cause of
distemper? You do, surely, bar the door upon your own
liberty, if you deny your griefs to your friend.
HAMLET: Sir, I lack advancement.
ROSENCRANTZ: How can that be, when you have the
voice of the king himself for your succession in Denmark?
HAMLET: Ay, but sir, ‘While the grass grows,’—the prov-
erb is something musty.
[Re-enter Players with recorders.]
O, the recorders! let me see one. To withdraw with you:—
why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you
would drive me into a toil?
GUILDENSTERN: O, my lord, if my duty be too bold,
my love is too unmannerly.
HAMLET: I do not well understand that. Will you play
upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN: My lord, I cannot.
 Hamlet, Act III, scene ii
HAMLET: I pray you. God bless you, sir!

GUILDENSTERN: Believe me, I cannot.
HAMLET: I do beseech you.
GUILDENSTERN: I know no touch of it, my lord.
LORD POLONIUS: My lord, the queen would speak with
you, and presently.
HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape
of a camel?

HAMLET: ’Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with LORD POLONIUS: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel,
your lingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, indeed.
and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these
are the stops. HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.

GUILDENSTERN: But these cannot I command to any LORD POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
utterance of harmony; I have not the skill.
HAMLET: Or like a whale?
HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you
make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to LORD POLONIUS: Very like a whale.
know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mys-
tery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top HAMLET: Then I will come to my mother by and by.
of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in They fool me to the top of my bent. I will come by and by.
this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do
you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me LORD POLONIUS: I will say so.
what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me. HAMLET: By and by is easily said.

[Enter POLONIUS.] [Exit POLONIUS.]

62
 Hamlet, Act III, scene iii
Leave me, friends.
[Exeunt all but HAMLET.]
Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world: now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on. Soft! now to my mother.
O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom:
Let me be cruel, not unnatural:
I will speak daggers to her, but use none;
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites;
How in my words soever she be shent,
To give them seals never, my soul, consent!
[Exit.]
SCENE III: A room in the castle.
[Enter KING CLAUDIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, and
GUILDENSTERN.]
KING CLAUDIUS: I like him not, nor stands it safe
with us
To let his madness range. Therefore prepare you;
63
I your commission will forthwith dispatch,
And he to England shall along with you:
The terms of our estate may not endure
Hazard so dangerous as doth hourly grow
Out of his lunacies.
GUILDENSTERN: We will ourselves provide:
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your majesty.
ROSENCRANTZ: The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armor of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What’s near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix’d on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoin’d; which, when it falls,
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
KING CLAUDIUS: Arm you, I pray you, to this speedy
voyage;
 Hamlet, Act III, scene iii
For we will fetters put upon this fear,
Which now goes too free-footed.
ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN : We will haste us.
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
[Enter POLONIUS.]
LORD POLONIUS: My lord, he’s going to his mother’s
closet:
Behind the arras I’ll convey myself,
To hear the process; and warrant she’ll tax him home:
And, as you said, and wisely was it said,
’Tis meet that some more audience than a mother,
Since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear
The speech, of vantage. Fare you well, my liege:
I’ll call upon you ere you go to bed,
And tell you what I know.
KING CLAUDIUS: Thanks, dear my lord.
[Exit POLONIUS.]
O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
64
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will:
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon’d being down? Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder’?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain the offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but ’tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell’d,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? what rests?
 Hamlet, Act III, scene iv
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.
[Retires and kneels.]
[Enter HAMLET.]
HAMLET: Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged. That would be scann’d:
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
’Tis heavy with him: and am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season’d for his passage?
65
No!
Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in’t;
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn’d and black
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays:
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.
[Exit.]
KING CLAUDIUS: [Rising] My words fly up, my
thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
[Exit.]
SCENE IV: The Queen’s closet.
[Enter QUEEN MARGARET and POLONIUS.]
LORD POLONIUS: He will come straight. Look you lay
home to him:
Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with,
And that your grace hath screen’d and stood between
 Hamlet, Act III, scene iv
Much heat and him. I’ll sconce me even here.
Pray you, be round with him.
HAMLET: [Within] Mother, mother, mother!
QUEEN GERTRUDE: I’ll warrant you,
Fear me not: withdraw, I hear him coming.
[POLONIUS hides behind the arras.]
[Enter HAMLET.]
HAMLET: Now, mother, what’s the matter?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Hamlet, thou hast thy father
much offended.
HAMLET: Mother, you have my father much offended.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Come, come, you answer with
an idle tongue.
HAMLET: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Why, how now, Hamlet!
HAMLET: What’s the matter now?
66
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Have you forgot me?
HAMLET: No, by the rood, not so:
You are the queen, your husband’s brother’s wife;
And—would it were not so!—you are my mother.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Nay, then, I’ll set those to you
that can speak.
HAMLET: Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not
budge;
You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: What wilt thou do? thou wilt not
murder me?
Help, help, ho!
LORD POLONIUS: [Behind] What, ho! help, help, help!
HAMLET: [Drawing] How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat,
dead!
[Makes a pass through the arras.]
LORD POLONIUS: [Behind] O, I am slain!
 Hamlet, Act III, scene iv
[Falls and dies.]
QUEEN GERTRUDE: O me, what hast thou done?
HAMLET: Nay, I know not:
Is it the king?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: O, what a rash and bloody deed
is this!
HAMLET: A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: As kill a king!
HAMLET: Ay, lady, ’twas my word.
[Lifts up the array and discovers POLONIUS.]
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune;
Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger.
Leave wringing of your hands: peace! sit you down,
And let me wring your heart; for so I shall,
If it be made of penetrable stuff,
If damned custom have not brass’d it so
That it is proof and bulwark against sense.
67
QUEEN GERTRUDE: What have I done, that thou
darest wag thy tongue
In noise so rude against me?
HAMLET: Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty,
Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love
And sets a blister there, makes marriage-vows
As false as dicers’ oaths: O, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words: heaven’s face doth glow:
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Ay me, what act,
That roars so loud, and thunders in the index?
HAMLET: Look here, upon this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See, what a grace was seated on this brow;
Hyperion’s curls; the front of Jove himself;
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command;
A station like the herald Mercury
New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill;
 Hamlet, Act III, scene iv
A combination and a form indeed, Since frost itself as actively doth burn
Where every god did seem to set his seal, And reason panders will.
To give the world assurance of a man:
This was your husband. Look you now, what follows: QUEEN GERTRUDE: O Hamlet, speak no more:
Here is your husband; like a mildew’d ear, Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul;
Blasting his wholesome brother. Have you eyes? And there I see such black and grained spots
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed, As will not leave their tinct.
And batten on this moor? Ha! have you eyes?
You cannot call it love; for at your age HAMLET: Nay, but to live
The hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s humble, In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
And waits upon the judgment: and what judgment Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Would step from this to this? Sense, sure, you have, Over the nasty sty,—
Else could you not have motion; but sure, that sense
Is apoplex’d; for madness would not err, QUEEN GERTRUDE: O, speak to me no more;
Nor sense to ecstasy was ne’er so thrall’d These words, like daggers, enter in mine ears;
But it reserved some quantity of choice, No more, sweet Hamlet!
To serve in such a difference. What devil was’t
That thus hath cozen’d you at hoodman-blind? HAMLET: A murderer and a villain;
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight, A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all, Of your precedent lord; a vice of kings;
Or but a sickly part of one true sense A cutpurse of the empire and the rule,
Could not so mope. That from a shelf the precious diadem stole,
O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell, And put it in his pocket!
If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax, QUEEN GERTRUDE: No more!
And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardor gives the charge, HAMLET: A king of shreds and patches,—
68
 Hamlet, Act III, scene iv
[Enter Ghost.]
Save me, and hover o’er me with your wings,
You heavenly guards! What would your gracious figure?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Alas, he’s mad!
HAMLET: Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by
The important acting of your dread command?
O, say!
Ghost: Do not forget: this visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But, look, amazement on thy mother sits:
O, step between her and her fighting soul:
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works:
Speak to her, Hamlet.
HAMLET: How is it with you, lady?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Alas, how is’t with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy
And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep;
And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm,
Your bedded hair, like life in excrements,
69
Starts up, and stands on end. O gentle son,
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look?
HAMLET: On him, on him! Look you, how pale he glares!
His form and cause conjoin’d, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable. Do not look upon me;
Lest with this piteous action you convert
My stern effects: then what I have to do
Will want true color; tears perchance for blood.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: To whom do you speak this?
HAMLET: Do you see nothing there?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.
HAMLET: Nor did you nothing hear?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: No, nothing but ourselves.
HAMLET: Why, look you there! look, how it steals away!
My father, in his habit as he lived!
Look, where he goes, even now, out at the portal!
[Exit Ghost.]
 Hamlet, Act III, scene iv
QUEEN GERTRUDE: This the very coinage of your brain:
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.
HAMLET: Ecstasy!
My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time,
And makes as healthful music: it is not madness
That I have utter’d: bring me to the test,
And I the matter will re-word; which madness
Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that mattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass, but my madness speaks:
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven;
Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come;
And do not spread the compost on the weeds,
To make them ranker. Forgive me this my virtue;
For in the fatness of these pursy times
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg,
Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my
heart in twain.
HAMLET: O, throw away the worser part of it,
And live the purer with the other half.
70
Good night: but go not to mine uncle’s bed;
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And either . . . . the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency. Once more, good night:
And when you are desirous to be bless’d,
I’ll blessing beg of you. For this same lord,
[Pointing to POLONIUS.]
I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
I will bestow him, and will answer well
The death I gave him. So, again, good night.
I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.
One word more, good lady.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: What shall I do?
 Hamlet, Act III, scene iv
HAMLET: Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;
Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damn’d fingers,
Make you to ravel all this matter out,
That I essentially am not in madness,
But mad in craft. ‘Twere good you let him know;
For who, that’s but a queen, fair, sober, wise,
Would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib,
Such dear concernings hide? who would do so?
No, in despite of sense and secrecy,
Unpeg the basket on the house’s top.
Let the birds fly, and, like the famous ape,
To try conclusions, in the basket creep,
And break your own neck down.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Be thou assured, if words be made
of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me.
HAMLET: I must to England; you know that?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Alack,
I had forgot: ’tis so concluded on.
71
HAMLET: There’s letters seal’d: and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d,
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way,
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;
For ’tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard: and ‘t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon: O, ’tis most sweet,
When in one line two crafts directly meet.
This man shall set me packing:
I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room.
Mother, good night. Indeed this counsellor
Is now most still, most secret and most grave,
Who was in life a foolish prating knave.
Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.
Good night, mother.
[Exeunt severally; HAMLET dragging in POLONIUS.]
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene i
ACT IV
SCENE I: A room in the castle.
[Enter KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE,
ROSENCRANTZ, and GUILDENSTERN.]
KING CLAUDIUS: There’s matter in these sighs, these
profound heaves:
You must translate: ’tis fit we understand them.
Where is your son?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Bestow this place on us a little while.
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
Ah, my good lord, what have I seen to-night!
KING CLAUDIUS: What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Mad as the sea and wind, when
both contend
Which is the mightier: in his lawless fit,
Behind the arras hearing something stir,
Whips out his rapier, cries, ‘A rat, a rat!’
And, in this brainish apprehension, kills
72
The unseen good old man.
KING CLAUDIUS: O heavy deed!
It had been so with us, had we been there:
His liberty is full of threats to all;
To you yourself, to us, to every one.
Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answer’d?
It will be laid to us, whose providence
Should have kept short, restrain’d and out of haunt,
This mad young man: but so much was our love,
We would not understand what was most fit;
But, like the owner of a foul disease,
To keep it from divulging, let it feed
Even on the pith of Life. Where is he gone?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: To draw apart the body he hath kill’d:
O’er whom his very madness, like some ore
Among a mineral of metals base,
Shows itself pure; he weeps for what is done.
KING CLAUDIUS: O Gertrude, come away!
The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch,
But we will ship him hence: and this vile deed
We must, with all our majesty and skill,
Both countenance and excuse. Ho, Guildenstern!
[Re-enter ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene ii
Friends both, go join you with some further aid:
Hamlet in madness hath Polonius slain,
And from his mother’s closet hath he dragg’d him:
Go seek him out; speak fair, and bring the body
Into the chapel. I pray you, haste in this.
[Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
Come, Gertrude, we’ll call up our wisest friends;
And let them know, both what we mean to do,
And what’s untimely done…
Whose whisper o’er the world’s diameter,
As level as the cannon to his blank,
Transports his poison’d shot, may miss our name,
And hit the woundless air. O, come away!
My soul is full of discord and dismay.
[Exeunt.]
SCENE II: Another room in the castle.
[Enter HAMLET.]
HAMLET: Safely stowed.
ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN: [Within]
Hamlet! Lord Hamlet!
73
HAMLET: What noise? who calls on Hamlet?
O, here they come.
[Enter ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]
ROSENCRANTZ: What have you done, my lord, with the
dead body?
HAMLET: Compounded it with dust, whereto ’tis kin.
ROSENCRANTZ: Tell us where ’tis, that we may take it
thence
And bear it to the chapel.
HAMLET: Do not believe it.
ROSENCRANTZ: Believe what?
HAMLET: That I can keep your counsel and not mine own.
Besides, to be demanded of a sponge! what
replication should be made by the son of a king?
ROSENCRANTZ: Take you me for a sponge, my lord?
HAMLET: Ay, sir, that soaks up the king’s countenance, his
rewards, his authorities. But such officers do the king best
service in the end: he keeps them, like an ape, in the corner
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene iii
of his jaw; first mouthed, to be last swallowed: when he needs
what you have gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge,
you shall be dry again.
ROSENCRANTZ: I understand you not, my lord.
HAMLET: I am glad of it: a knavish speech sleeps in a
foolish ear.
ROSENCRANTZ: My lord, you must tell us where the
body is, and go with us to the king.
HAMLET: The body is with the king, but the king is not
with the body. The king is a thing—
GUILDENSTERN: A thing, my lord!
HAMLET: Of nothing: bring me to him. Hide fox, and all
after.
[Exeunt.]
74
SCENE III: Another room in the castle.
[Enter KING CLAUDIUS, attended.]
KING CLAUDIUS: I have sent to seek him, and to find
the body.
How dangerous is it that this man goes loose!
Yet must not we put the strong law on him:
He’s loved of the distracted multitude,
Who like not in their judgment, but their eyes;
And where tis so, the offender’s scourge is weigh’d,
But never the offence. To bear all smooth and even,
This sudden sending him away must seem
Deliberate pause: diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.
[Enter ROSENCRANTZ.]
How now! what hath befall’n?
ROSENCRANTZ: Where the dead body is bestow’d, my
lord,
We cannot get from him.
KING CLAUDIUS: But where is he?
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene iii
ROSENCRANTZ: Without, my lord; guarded, to know
your pleasure.
KING CLAUDIUS: Bring him before us.
ROSENCRANTZ: Ho, Guildenstern! bring in my lord.
[Enter HAMLET and GUILDENSTERN.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
HAMLET: At supper.
KING CLAUDIUS: At supper! where?
HAMLET: Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a cer-
tain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm
is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat
us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your
lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one
table: that’s the end.
KING CLAUDIUS: Alas, alas!
HAMLET: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat
of a king, and cat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
75
KING CLAUDIUS: What dost you mean by this?
HAMLET: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a
progress through the guts of a beggar.
KING CLAUDIUS: Where is Polonius?
HAMLET: In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger
find him not there, seek him i’ the other place yourself. But
indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall
nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.
KING CLAUDIUS: Go seek him there.
[To some Attendants.]
HAMLET: He will stay till ye come.
[Exeunt Attendants.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Hamlet, this deed, for thine especial
safety,—
Which we do tender, as we dearly grieve
For that which thou hast done,—must send thee hence
With fiery quickness: therefore prepare thyself;
The bark is ready, and the wind at help,
The associates tend, and every thing is bent
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene iv
For England. [Exeunt ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN.]

HAMLET: For England! And, England, if my love thou hold’st at aught—

KING CLAUDIUS: Ay, Hamlet.
HAMLET: Good.
KING CLAUDIUS: So is it, if thou knew’st our purposes.
HAMLET: I see a cherub that sees them. But, come; for
England! Farewell, dear mother.
KING CLAUDIUS: Thy loving father, Hamlet.
HAMLET: My mother: father and mother is man and wife;
man and wife is one flesh; and so, my mother. Come, for
England!
[Exit.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Follow him at foot; tempt him with
speed aboard;
Delay it not; I’ll have him hence to-night:
Away! for every thing is seal’d and done
That else leans on the affair: pray you, make haste.
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As my great power thereof may give thee sense,
Since yet thy cicatrice looks raw and red
After the Danish sword, and thy free awe
Pays homage to us—thou mayst not coldly set
Our sovereign process; which imports at full,
By letters congruing to that effect,
The present death of Hamlet. Do it, England;
For like the hectic in my blood he rages,
And thou must cure me: till I know ’tis done,
Howe’er my haps, my joys were ne’er begun.
[Exit.]
SCENE IV: A plain in Denmark.
[Enter FORTINBRAS, a Captain, and Soldiers, marching.]
PRINCE FORTINBRAS: Go, captain, from me greet the
Danish king;
Tell him that, by his license, Fortinbras
Craves the conveyance of a promised march
Over his kingdom. You know the rendezvous.
If that his majesty would aught with us,
We shall express our duty in his eye;
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene iv
And let him know so.
Captain: I will do’t, my lord.
PRINCE FORTINBRAS: Go softly on.
[Exeunt FORTINBRAS and Soldiers.]
[Enter HAMLET, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN,
and others.]
HAMLET: Good sir, whose powers are these?
Captain: They are of Norway, sir.
HAMLET: How purposed, sir, I pray you?
Captain: Against some part of Poland.
HAMLET: Who commands them, sir?
Captain: The nephews to old Norway, Fortinbras.
HAMLET: Goes it against the main of Poland, sir,
Or for some frontier?
Captain: Truly to speak, and with no addition,
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We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it;
Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole
A ranker rate, should it be sold in fee.
HAMLET: Why, then the Polack never will defend it.
Captain: Yes, it is already garrison’d.
HAMLET: Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats
Will not debate the question of this straw:
This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace,
That inward breaks, and shows no cause without
Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir.
Captain: God be wi’ you, sir.
[Exit.]
ROSENCRANTZ: Wilt please you go, my lord?
HAMLET: I’ll be with you straight go a little before.
[Exeunt all except HAMLET.]
How all occasions do inform against me,
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene v
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff ’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
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The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
[Exit.]
SCENE V: Elsinore. A room in the castle.
[Enter QUEEN GERTRUDE, HORATIO, and a Gentleman.]
QUEEN GERTRUDE: I will not speak with her.
Gentleman: She is importunate, indeed distract:
Her mood will needs be pitied.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: What would she have?
Gentleman: She speaks much of her father; says she hears
There’s tricks i’ the world; and hems, and beats her heart;
Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half sense: her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they aim at it,
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene v

And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts; From another one?
Which, as her winks, and nods, and gestures yield them, By his cockle hat and staff,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought, And his sandal shoon.
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Alas, sweet lady, what imports
HORATIO: ‘Twere good she were spoken with; for she this song?
may strew
Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds. OPHELIA: Say you? nay, pray you, mark.

QUEEN GERTRUDE: Let her come in. [Sings.]

[Exit HORATIO.] He is dead and gone, lady,

He is dead and gone;
To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, At his head a grass-green turf,
Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss: At his heels a stone.
So full of artless jealousy is guilt,
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. QUEEN GERTRUDE: Nay, but, Ophelia,—

[Re-enter HORATIO, with OPHELIA.] OPHELIA: Pray you, mark.

OPHELIA: Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark? [Sings.]

QUEEN GERTRUDE: How now, Ophelia! White his shroud as the mountain snow,—

OPHELIA: [Sings.] [Enter KING CLAUDIUS.]

How should I your true love know QUEEN GERTRUDE: Alas, look here, my lord.
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 Hamlet, Act IV, scene v
OPHELIA: [Sings.]
Larded with sweet flowers
Which bewept to the grave did go
With true-love showers.
KING CLAUDIUS: How do you, pretty lady?
OPHELIA: Well, God ‘ild you! They say the owl was a
baker’s daughter. Lord, we know what we are, but know not
what we may be. God be at your table!
KING CLAUDIUS: Conceit upon her father.
OPHELIA: Pray you, let’s have no words of this; but when
they ask you what it means, say you this:
[Sings.]
To-morrow is Saint Valentine’s day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn’d his clothes,
And dupp’d the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
80
KING CLAUDIUS: Pretty Ophelia!
OPHELIA: Indeed, la, without an oath, I’ll make an end on’t:
[Sings.]
By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do’t, if they come to’t;
By cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.
So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.
KING CLAUDIUS: How long hath she been thus?
OPHELIA: I hope all will be well. We must be patient: but
I cannot choose but weep, to think they should lay him i’
the cold ground. My brother shall know of it: and so I thank
you for your good counsel. Come, my coach! Good night,
ladies; good night, sweet ladies; good night, good night.
[Exit.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Follow her close; give her good watch,
I pray you.
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene v
[Exit HORATIO.]
O, this is the poison of deep grief; it springs
All from her father’s death. O Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions. First, her father slain:
Next, your son gone; and he most violent author
Of his own just remove: the people muddied,
Thick and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers,
For good Polonius’ death; and we have done but greenly,
In hugger-mugger to inter him: poor Ophelia
Divided from herself and her fair judgment,
Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts:
Last, and as much containing as all these,
Her brother is in secret come from France;
Feeds on his wonder, keeps himself in clouds,
And wants not buzzers to infect his ear
With pestilent speeches of his father’s death;
Wherein necessity, of matter beggar’d,
Will nothing stick our person to arraign
In ear and ear. O my dear Gertrude, this,
Like to a murdering-piece, in many places
Gives me superfluous death.
[A noise within.]
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Alack, what noise is this?
81
KING CLAUDIUS: Where are my Switzers? Let them
guard the door.
[Enter another Gentleman.]
What is the matter?
Gentleman: Save yourself, my lord:
The ocean, overpeering of his list,
Eats not the flats with more impetuous haste
Than young Laertes, in a riotous head,
O’erbears your officers. The rabble call him lord;
And, as the world were now but to begin,
Antiquity forgot, custom not known,
The ratifiers and props of every word,
They cry ‘Choose we: Laertes shall be king:’
Caps, hands, and tongues, applaud it to the clouds:
‘Laertes shall be king, Laertes king!’
QUEEN GERTRUDE: How cheerfully on the false trail
they cry!
O, this is counter, you false Danish dogs!
KING CLAUDIUS: The doors are broke.
[Noise within.]
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene v

[Enter LAERTES, armed; Danes following.] That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will. Tell me, Laertes,
LAERTES: Where is this king? Sirs, stand you all without. Why thou art thus incensed. Let him go, Gertrude.
Speak, man.
Danes: No, let’s come in.
LAERTES: Where is my father?
LAERTES: I pray you, give me leave.
KING CLAUDIUS: Dead.
Danes: We will, we will.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: But not by him.
[They retire without the door.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Let him demand his fill.
LAERTES: I thank you: keep the door. O thou vile king,
Give me my father! LAERTES: How came he dead? I’ll not be juggled with:
To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Calmly, good Laertes. Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation. To this point I stand,
LAERTES: That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me That both the worlds I give to negligence,
bastard, Let come what comes; only I’ll be revenged
Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot Most thoroughly for my father.
Even here, between the chaste unsmirched brow
Of my true mother. KING CLAUDIUS: Who shall stay you?

KING CLAUDIUS: What is the cause, Laertes, LAERTES: My will, not all the world:
That thy rebellion looks so giant-like? And for my means, I’ll husband them so well,
Let him go, Gertrude; do not fear our person: They shall go far with little.
There’s such divinity doth hedge a king,
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 Hamlet, Act IV, scene v

KING CLAUDIUS: Good Laertes, O heat, dry up my brains! tears seven times salt,
If you desire to know the certainty Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!
Of your dear father’s death, is’t writ in your revenge, By heaven, thy madness shall be paid by weight,
That, swoopstake, you will draw both friend and foe, Till our scale turn the beam. O rose of May!
Winner and loser? Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!
O heavens! is’t possible, a young maid’s wits
LAERTES: None but his enemies. Should be as moral as an old man’s life?
Nature is fine in love, and where ’tis fine,
KING CLAUDIUS: Will you know them then? It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.
LAERTES: To his good friends thus wide I’ll ope my arms;
And like the kind life-rendering pelican, OPHELIA: [Sings.]
Repast them with my blood.
They bore him barefaced on the bier;
KING CLAUDIUS: Why, now you speak Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
Like a good child and a true gentleman. And in his grave rain’d many a tear:—
That I am guiltless of your father’s death, Fare you well, my dove!
And am most sensible in grief for it,
It shall as level to your judgment pierce LAERTES: Hadst thou thy wits, and didst persuade revenge,
As day does to your eye. It could not move thus.

Danes: [Within] Let her come in. OPHELIA: [Sings.]

LAERTES: How now! what noise is that? You must sing a-down a-down,
An you call him a-down-a.
[Re-enter OPHELIA.] O, how the wheel becomes it! It is the false
steward, that stole his master’s daughter.
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 Hamlet, Act IV, scene v
LAERTES: This nothing’s more than matter.
OPHELIA: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray,
love, remember: and there is pansies. that’s for thoughts.
LAERTES: A document in madness, thoughts and remem-
brance fitted.
OPHELIA: There’s fennel for you, and columbines: there’s
rue for you; and here’s some for me: we may call it herb-
grace o’ Sundays: O you must wear your rue with a differ-
ence. There’s a daisy: I would give you some violets, but
they withered all when my father died: they say he made a
good end,—
[Sings.]
For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy.
LAERTES: Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself,
She turns to favor and to prettiness.
OPHELIA: [Sings.]
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
No, no, he is dead:
84
Go to thy death-bed:
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll:
He is gone, he is gone,
And we cast away moan:
God ha’ mercy on his soul!
And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God be wi’ ye.
[Exit.]
LAERTES: Do you see this, O God?
KING CLAUDIUS: Laertes, I must commune with your
grief,
Or you deny me right. Go but apart,
Make choice of whom your wisest friends you will.
And they shall hear and judge ‘twixt you and me:
If by direct or by collateral hand
They find us touch’d, we will our kingdom give,
Our crown, our life, and all that we can ours,
To you in satisfaction; but if not,
Be you content to lend your patience to us,
And we shall jointly labor with your soul
To give it due content.
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene vi

LAERTES: Let this be so; [Enter Sailors.]

His means of death, his obscure funeral—
No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o’er his bones,
No noble rite nor formal ostentation—
Cry to be heard, as ‘twere from heaven to earth,
That I must call’t in question.
KING CLAUDIUS: So you shall;
And where the offence is let the great axe fall.
I pray you, go with me.
[Exeunt.]
SCENE VI: Another room in the castle.
[Enter HORATIO and a Servant.]
HORATIO: What are they that would speak with me?
Servant: Sailors, sir: they say they have letters for you.
HORATIO: Let them come in.
[Exit Servant.]
I do not know from what part of the world
I should be greeted, if not from Lord Hamlet.
85
First Sailor: God bless you, sir.
HORATIO: Let him bless thee too.
First Sailor: He shall, sir, an’t please him. There’s a letter for
you, sir; it comes from the ambassador that was bound for
England; if your name be Horatio, as I am let to know it is.
HORATIO: [Reads] ‘Horatio, when thou shalt have over-
looked this, give these fellows some means to the king: they
have letters for him. Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate
of very warlike appointment gave us chase. Finding ourselves
too slow of sail, we put on a compelled valor, and in the
grapple I boarded them: on the instant they got clear of our
ship; so I alone became their prisoner. They have dealt with
me like thieves of mercy: but they knew what they did; I am
to do a good turn for them. Let the king have the letters I
have sent; and repair thou to me with as much speed as thou
wouldst fly death. I have words to speak in thine ear will
make thee dumb; yet are they much too light for the bore of
the matter. These good fellows will bring thee where I am.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hold their course for England:
of them I have much to tell thee. Farewell.
‘He that thou knowest thine, HAMLET.’
Come, I will make you way for these your letters;
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene vii
And do’t the speedier, that you may direct me
To him from whom you brought them.
[Exeunt.]
SCENE VII: Another room in the castle.
[Enter KING CLAUDIUS and LAERTES.]
KING CLAUDIUS: Now must your conscience my
acquaintance seal,
And you must put me in your heart for friend,
Sith you have heard, and with a knowing ear,
That he which hath your noble father slain
Pursued my life.
LAERTES: It well appears: but tell me
Why you proceeded not against these feats,
So crimeful and so capital in nature,
As by your safety, wisdom, all things else,
You mainly were stirr’d up.
KING CLAUDIUS: O, for two special reasons;
Which may to you, perhaps, seem much unsinew’d,
But yet to me they are strong. The queen his mother
Lives almost by his looks; and for myself—
My virtue or my plague, be it either which—
86
She’s so conjunctive to my life and soul,
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her. The other motive,
Why to a public count I might not go,
Is the great love the general gender bear him;
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces; so that my arrows,
Too slightly timber’d for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aim’d them.
LAERTES: And so have I a noble father lost;
A sister driven into desperate terms,
Whose worth, if praises may go back again,
Stood challenger on mount of all the age
For her perfections: but my revenge will come.
KING CLAUDIUS: Break not your sleeps for that: you
must not think
That we are made of stuff so flat and dull
That we can let our beard be shook with danger
And think it pastime. You shortly shall hear more:
I loved your father, and we love ourself;
And that, I hope, will teach you to imagine—
[Enter a Messenger.]
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene vii

How now! what news? KING CLAUDIUS: ’Tis Hamlets character. ‘Naked!
And in a postscript here, he says ‘alone.’
Messenger: Letters, my lord, from Hamlet: Can you advise me?
This to your majesty; this to the queen.
LAERTES: I’m lost in it, my lord. But let him come;
KING CLAUDIUS: From Hamlet! who brought them? It warms the very sickness in my heart,
That I shall live and tell him to his teeth,
Messenger: Sailors, my lord, they say; I saw them not: ‘Thus didest thou.’
They were given me by Claudio; he received them
Of him that brought them. KING CLAUDIUS: If it be so, Laertes—
As how should it be so? how otherwise?—
KING CLAUDIUS: Laertes, you shall hear them. Will you be ruled by me?
Leave us.
LAERTES: Ay, my lord;
[Exit Messenger.] So you will not o’errule me to a peace.

[Reads.] KING CLAUDIUS: To thine own peace. If he be now

‘High and mighty, You shall know I am set naked on your
kingdom. To-morrow shall I beg leave to see your kingly
eyes: when I shall, first asking your pardon thereunto, re-
count the occasion of my sudden and more strange return.
‘HAMLET.’
What should this mean? Are all the rest come back?
Or is it some abuse, and no such thing?
return’d,
As checking at his voyage, and that he means
No more to undertake it, I will work him
To an exploit, now ripe in my device,
Under the which he shall not choose but fall:
And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe,
But even his mother shall uncharge the practice
And call it accident.

LAERTES: Know you the hand? LAERTES: My lord, I will be ruled;

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 Hamlet, Act IV, scene vii
The rather, if you could devise it so
That I might be the organ.
KING CLAUDIUS: It falls right.
You have been talk’d of since your travel much,
And that in Hamlet’s hearing, for a quality
Wherein, they say, you shine: your sum of parts
Did not together pluck such envy from him
As did that one, and that, in my regard,
Of the unworthiest siege.
LAERTES: What part is that, my lord?
KING CLAUDIUS: A very riband in the cap of youth,
Yet needful too; for youth no less becomes
The light and careless livery that it wears
Than settled age his sables and his weeds,
Importing health and graveness. Two months since,
Here was a gentleman of Normandy:—
I’ve seen myself, and served against, the French,
And they can well on horseback: but this gallant
Had witchcraft in’t; he grew unto his seat;
And to such wondrous doing brought his horse,
As he had been incorpsed and demi-natured
With the brave beast: so far he topp’d my thought,
That I, in forgery of shapes and tricks,
Come short of what he did.
88
LAERTES: A Norman was’t?
KING CLAUDIUS: A Norman.
LAERTES: Upon my life, Lamond.
KING CLAUDIUS: The very same.
LAERTES: I know him well: he is the brooch indeed
And gem of all the nation.
KING CLAUDIUS: He made confession of you,
And gave you such a masterly report
For art and exercise in your defence
And for your rapier most especially,
That he cried out, ’twould be a sight indeed,
If one could match you: the scrimers of their nation,
He swore, had had neither motion, guard, nor eye,
If you opposed them. Sir, this report of his
Did Hamlet so envenom with his envy
That he could nothing do but wish and beg
Your sudden coming o’er, to play with him.
Now, out of this,—
LAERTES: What out of this, my lord?
KING CLAUDIUS: Laertes, was your father dear to you?
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene vii
Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart?
LAERTES: Why ask you this?
KING CLAUDIUS: Not that I think you did not love
your father;
But that I know love is begun by time;
And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it;
And nothing is at a like goodness still;
For goodness, growing to a plurisy,
Dies in his own too much: that we would do
We should do when we would; for this ‘would’ changes
And hath abatements and delays as many
As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents;
And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift sigh,
That hurts by easing. But, to the quick o’ the ulcer:—
Hamlet comes back: what would you undertake,
To show yourself your father’s son in deed
More than in words?
LAERTES: To cut his throat i’ the church.
KING CLAUDIUS: No place, indeed, should murder
89
sanctuarize;
Revenge should have no bounds. But, good Laertes,
Will you do this, keep close within your chamber.
Hamlet return’d shall know you are come home:
We’ll put on those shall praise your excellence
And set a double varnish on the fame
The Frenchman gave you, bring you in fine together
And wager on your heads: he, being remiss,
Most generous and free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils; so that, with ease,
Or with a little shuffling, you may choose
A sword unbated, and in a pass of practice
Requite him for your father.
LAERTES: I will do’t:
And, for that purpose, I’ll anoint my sword.
I bought an unction of a mountebank,
So mortal that, but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
That is but scratch’d withal: I’ll touch my point
With this contagion, that, if I gall him slightly,
It may be death.
KING CLAUDIUS: Let’s further think of this;
Weigh what convenience both of time and means
 Hamlet, Act IV, scene vii
May fit us to our shape: if this should fail,
And that our drift look through our bad performance,
‘Twere better not assay’d: therefore this project
Should have a back or second, that might hold,
If this should blast in proof. Soft! let me see:
We’ll make a solemn wager on your cunnings:
I ha’t.
When in your motion you are hot and dry—
As make your bouts more violent to that end—
And that he calls for drink, I’ll have prepared him
A chalice for the nonce, whereon but sipping,
If he by chance escape your venom’d stuck,
Our purpose may hold there.
[Enter QUEEN GERTRUDE.]
How now, sweet queen!
QUEEN GERTRUDE: One woe doth tread upon
another’s heel,
So fast they follow; your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.
LAERTES: Drown’d! O, where?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
90
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
LAERTES: Alas, then, she is drown’d?
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Drown’d, drown’d.
LAERTES: Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears: but yet
It is our trick; nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will: when these are gone,
The woman will be out. Adieu, my lord:
I have a speech of fire, that fain would blaze,
But that this folly douts it.
 Hamlet, Act V, scene i

[Exit.] First Clown: It must be ‘se offendendo;’ it cannot be else.

For here lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly, it argues
KING CLAUDIUS: Let’s follow, Gertrude: an act: and an act hath three branches: it is, to act, to do, to
How much I had to do to calm his rage! perform: argal, she drowned herself wittingly.
Now fear I this will give it start again;
Therefore let’s follow. Second Clown: Nay, but hear you, goodman delver,—

[Exeunt.] First Clown: Give me leave. Here lies the water; good: here
stands the man; good; if the man go to this water, and drown
ACT V himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes,—mark you that; but
if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not
himself: argal, he that is not guilty of his own death short-
SCENE I: A churchyard. ens not his own life.

[Enter two Clowns, with spades, &c.] Second Clown: But is this law?

First Clown: Is she to be buried in Christian burial that First Clown: Ay, marry, is’t; crowner’s quest law.
wilfully seeks her own salvation?
Second Clown: Will you ha’ the truth on’t? If this had not
Second Clown: I tell thee she is: and therefore make her been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out o’
grave straight: the crowner hath sat on her, and finds it Chris- Christian burial.
tian burial.
First Clown: Why, there thou say’st: and the more pity that
First Clown: How can that be, unless she drowned herself great folk should have countenance in this world to drown
in her own defence? or hang themselves, more than their even Christian. Come,
my spade. There is no ancient gentleman but gardeners,
Second Clown: Why, ’tis found so. ditchers, and grave-makers: they hold up Adam’s profession.
91
 Hamlet, Act V, scene i
Second Clown: Was he a gentleman?
First Clown: He was the first that ever bore arms.
Second Clown: Why, he had none.
First Clown: What, art a heathen? How dost thou under-
stand the Scripture? The Scripture says ‘Adam digged:’ could
he dig without arms? I’ll put another question to thee: if
thou answerest me not to the purpose, confess thyself—
Second Clown: Go to.
First Clown: What is he that builds stronger than either the
mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?
Second Clown: The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives
a thousand tenants.
First Clown: I like thy wit well, in good faith: the gallows
does well; but how does it well? it does well to those that do
in: now thou dost ill to say the gallows is built stronger than
the church: argal, the gallows may do well to thee. To’t again,
come.
Second Clown: ‘Who builds stronger than a mason, a ship-
wright, or a carpenter?’
92
First Clown: Ay, tell me that, and unyoke.
Second Clown: Marry, now I can tell.
First Clown: To’t.
Second Clown: Mass, I cannot tell.
[Enter HAMLET and HORATIO, at a distance.]
First Clown: Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your
dull ass will not mend his pace with beating; and, when you
are asked this question next, say ‘a grave-maker: ‘the houses
that he makes last till doomsday. Go, get thee to Yaughan:
fetch me a stoup of liquor.
[Exit Second Clown.]
[He digs and sings.]
In youth, when I did love, did love,
Methought it was very sweet,
To contract, O, the time, for, ah, my behove,
O, methought, there was nothing meet.
HAMLET: Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that
he sings at grave-making?
 Hamlet, Act V, scene i
HORATIO: Custom hath made it in him a property of HORATIO: Ay, my lord.
easiness.
HAMLET: Why, e’en so: and now my Lady Worm’s;
HAMLET: ’Tis e’en so: the hand of little employment hath chapless, and knocked about the mazzard with a sexton’s
the daintier sense. spade: here’s fine revolution, an we had the trick to see’t.
Did these bones cost no more the breeding, but to play at
First Clown: [Sings.] loggats with ‘em? mine ache to think on’t.

But age, with his stealing steps, First Clown: [Sings.]

Hath claw’d me in his clutch,
And hath shipped me intil the land, A pick-axe, and a spade, a spade,
As if I had never been such. For and a shrouding sheet:
O, a pit of clay for to be made
[Throws up a skull.] For such a guest is meet.

HAMLET: That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing
once: how the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were
Cain’s jaw-bone, that did the first murder! It might be the
pate of a politician, which this ass now o’er-reaches; one that
would circumvent God, might it not?
HORATIO: It might, my lord.
HAMLET: Or of a courtier; which could say ‘Good mor-
row, sweet lord! How dost thou, good lord?’ This might be
my lord such-a-one, that praised my lord such-a-one’s horse,
when he meant to beg it; might it not?
93
[Throws up another skull.]
HAMLET: There’s another: why may not that be the skull
of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his
cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he suffer this rude
knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel,
and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This
fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his stat-
utes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his
recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his
recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? will his
vouchers vouch him no more of his purchases, and double
 Hamlet, Act V, scene i
ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of inden-
tures? The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in
this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?
HORATIO: Not a jot more, my lord.
HAMLET: Is not parchment made of sheepskins?
HORATIO: Ay, my lord, and of calf-skins too.
HAMLET: They are sheep and calves which seek out assur-
ance in that. I will speak to this fellow. Whose grave’s this,
sirrah?
First Clown: Mine, sir.
[Sings.]
O, a pit of clay for to be made
For such a guest is meet.
HAMLET: I think it be thine, indeed; for thou liest in’t.
First Clown: You lie out on’t, sir, and therefore it is not
yours: for my part, I do not lie in’t, and yet it is mine.
HAMLET: ‘Thou dost lie in’t, to be in’t and say it is thine:
94
’tis for the dead, not for the quick; therefore thou liest.
First Clown: ’Tis a quick lie, sir; ‘twill away gain, from me
to you.
HAMLET: What man dost thou dig it for?
First Clown: For no man, sir.
HAMLET: What woman, then?
First Clown: For none, neither.
HAMLET: Who is to be buried in’t?
First Clown: One that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul,
she’s dead.
HAMLET: How absolute the knave is! we must speak by
the card, or equivocation will undo us. By the Lord, Horatio,
these three years I have taken a note of it; the age is grown so
picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of
the courtier, he gaffs his kibe. How long hast thou been a
grave-maker?
First Clown: Of all the days i’ the year, I came to’t that day
that our last king Hamlet overcame Fortinbras.
 Hamlet, Act V, scene i
HAMLET: How long is that since?
First Clown: Cannot you tell that? every fool can tell that: it
was the very day that young Hamlet was born; he that is
mad, and sent into England.
HAMLET: Ay, marry, why was he sent into England?
First Clown: Why, because he was mad: he shall recover his
wits there; or, if he do not, it’s no great matter there.
HAMLET: Why?
First Clown: ‘Twill, a not be seen in him there; there the
men are as mad as he.
HAMLET: How came he mad?
First Clown: Very strangely, they say.
HAMLET: How strangely?
First Clown: Faith, e’en with losing his wits.
HAMLET: Upon what ground?
First Clown: Why, here in Denmark: I have been sexton
95
here, man and boy, thirty years.
HAMLET: How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?
First Clown: I’ faith, if he be not rotten before he die—as
we have many pocky corses now- a-days, that will scarce
hold the laying in—he will last you some eight year or nine
year: a tanner will last you nine year.
HAMLET: Why he more than another?
First Clown: Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade,
that he will keep out water a great while; and your water is
a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body. Here’s a skull
now; this skull has lain in the earth three and twenty years.
HAMLET: Whose was it?
First Clown: A whoreson mad fellow’s it was: whose do you
think it was?
HAMLET: Nay, I know not.
First Clown: A pestilence on him for a mad rogue! a’ poured
a flagon of Rhenish on my head once. This same skull, sir,
was Yorick’s skull, the king’s jester.
 Hamlet, Act V, scene i
HAMLET: This?
First Clown: E’en that.
HAMLET: Let me see.
[Takes the skull.]
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite
jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back
a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagina-
tion it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I
have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?
Your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that
were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock
your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my
lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to
this favor she must come; make her laugh at that. Prithee,
Horatio, tell me one thing.
HORATIO: What’s that, my lord?
HAMLET: Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fash-
ion i’ the earth?
HORATIO: E’en so.
96
HAMLET: And smelt so? pah!
[Puts down the skull.]
HORATIO: E’en so, my lord.
HAMLET: To what base uses we may return, Horatio!
Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of
Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
HORATIO: ‘Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.
HAMLET: No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither
with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus:
Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth
into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why
of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop
a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!
But soft! but soft! aside: here comes the king.
[Enter Priest, &c. in procession; the Corpse of OPHELIA,
LAERTES and Mourners following; KING CLAUDIUS,
 Hamlet, Act V, scene i
QUEEN GERTRUDE, their trains, &c.]
The queen, the courtiers: who is this they follow?
And with such maimed rites? This doth betoken
The corse they follow did with desperate hand
Fordo its own life: ’twas of some estate.
Couch we awhile, and mark.
[Retiring with HORATIO.]
LAERTES: What ceremony else?
HAMLET: That is Laertes,
A very noble youth: mark.
LAERTES: What ceremony else?
First Priest: Her obsequies have been as far enlarged
As we have warrantise: her death was doubtful;
And, but that great command o’ersways the order,
She should in ground unsanctified have lodged
Till the last trumpet: for charitable prayers,
Shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her;
Yet here she is allow’d her virgin crants,
Her maiden strewments and the bringing home
Of bell and burial.
97
LAERTES: Must there no more be done?
First Priest: No more be done:
We should profane the service of the dead
To sing a requiem and such rest to her
As to peace-parted souls.
LAERTES: Lay her i’ the earth:
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,
A ministering angel shall my sister be,
When thou liest howling.
HAMLET: What, the fair Ophelia!
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Sweets to the sweet: farewell!
[Scattering flowers.]
I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife;
I thought thy bride-bed to have deck’d, sweet maid,
And not have strew’d thy grave.
LAERTES: O, treble woe
Fall ten times treble on that cursed head,
Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense
Deprived thee of! Hold off the earth awhile,
 Hamlet, Act V, scene i
Till I have caught her once more in mine arms:
[Leaps into the grave.]
Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead,
Till of this flat a mountain you have made,
To o’ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.
HAMLET: [Advancing] What is he whose grief
Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow
Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand
Like wonder-wounded hearers? This is I,
Hamlet the Dane.
[Leaps into the grave.]
LAERTES: The devil take thy soul!
[Grappling with him.]
HAMLET: Thou pray’st not well.
I prithee, take thy fingers from my throat;
For, though I am not splenitive and rash,
Yet have I something in me dangerous,
Which let thy wiseness fear: hold off thy hand.
98
KING CLAUDIUS: Pluck them asunder.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Hamlet, Hamlet!
All: Gentlemen,—
HORATIO: Good my lord, be quiet.
[The Attendants part them, and they come out of the grave.]
HAMLET: Why I will fight with him upon this theme
Until my eyelids will no longer wag.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: O my son, what theme?
HAMLET: I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?
KING CLAUDIUS: O, he is mad, Laertes.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: For love of God, forbear him.
HAMLET: ‘Swounds, show me what thou’lt do:
Woo’t weep? woo’t fight? woo’t fast? woo’t tear thyself?
Woo’t drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?
I’ll do’t. Dost thou come here to whine?
 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I:
And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou’lt mouth,
I’ll rant as well as thou.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: This is mere madness:
And thus awhile the fit will work on him;
Anon, as patient as the female dove,
When that her golden couplets are disclosed,
His silence will sit drooping.
HAMLET: Hear you, sir;
What is the reason that you use me thus?
I loved you ever: but it is no matter;
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.
[Exit.]
KING CLAUDIUS: I pray you, good Horatio, wait upon
him.
[Exit HORATIO.]
99
[To LAERTES.]
Strengthen your patience in our last night’s speech;
We’ll put the matter to the present push.
Good Gertrude, set some watch over your son.
This grave shall have a living monument:
An hour of quiet shortly shall we see;
Till then, in patience our proceeding be.
[Exeunt.]
SCENE II: A hall in the castle.
[Enter HAMLET and HORATIO.]
HAMLET: So much for this, sir: now shall you see the other;
You do remember all the circumstance?
HORATIO: Remember it, my lord?
HAMLET: Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting,
That would not let me sleep: methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly,
And praised be rashness for it, let us know,
Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well,
When our deep plots do pall: and that should teach us
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
Rough-hew them how we will,—
HORATIO: That is most certain.
HAMLET: Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf ’d about me, in the dark
Groped I to find out them; had my desire.
Finger’d their packet, and in fine withdrew
To mine own room again; making so bold,
My fears forgetting manners, to unseal
Their grand commission; where I found, Horatio,—
O royal knavery!—an exact command,
Larded with many several sorts of reasons
Importing Denmark’s health and England’s too,
With, ho! such bugs and goblins in my life,
That, on the supervise, no leisure bated,
No, not to stay the grinding of the axe,
My head should be struck off.
HORATIO: Is’t possible?
HAMLET: Here’s the commission: read it at more leisure.
But wilt thou hear me how I did proceed?
HORATIO: I beseech you.
HAMLET: Being thus be-netted round with villanies,—
100
Ere I could make a prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play—I sat me down,
Devised a new commission, wrote it fair:
I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair and labor’d much
How to forget that learning, but, sir, now
It did me yeoman’s service: wilt thou know
The effect of what I wrote?
HORATIO: Ay, good my lord.
HAMLET: An earnest conjuration from the king,
As England was his faithful tributary,
As love between them like the palm might flourish,
As peace should stiff her wheaten garland wear
And stand a comma ‘tween their amities,
And many such-like ‘As’es of great charge,
That, on the view and knowing of these contents,
Without debatement further, more or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
Not shriving-time allow’d.
HORATIO: How was this seal’d?
HAMLET: Why, even in that was heaven ordinant.
I had my father’s signet in my purse,
Which was the model of that Danish seal;
 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
Folded the writ up in form of the other,
Subscribed it, gave’t the impression, placed it safely,
The changeling never known. Now, the next day
Was our sea-fight; and what to this was sequent
Thou know’st already.
HORATIO: So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t.
HAMLET: Why, man, they did make love to this employment;
They are not near my conscience; their defeat
Does by their own insinuation grow:
’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.
HORATIO: Why, what a king is this!
HAMLET: Does it not, think’st thee, stand me now upon—
He that hath kill’d my king and whored my mother,
Popp’d in between the election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage—is’t not perfect conscience,
To quit him with this arm? and is’t not to be damn’d,
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
HORATIO: It must be shortly known to him from England
101
What is the issue of the business there.
HAMLET: It will be short: the interim is mine;
And a man’s life’s no more than to say ‘One.’
But I am very sorry, good Horatio,
That to Laertes I forgot myself;
For, by the image of my cause, I see
The portraiture of his: I’ll court his favors.
But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me
Into a towering passion.
HORATIO: Peace! who comes here?
[Enter OSRIC.]
OSRIC: Your lordship is right welcome back to Denmark.
HAMLET: I humbly thank you, sir. Dost know this
water-fly?
HORATIO: No, my good lord.
HAMLET: Thy state is the more gracious; for ’tis a vice to
know him. He hath much land, and fertile: let a beast be
lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the king’s mess: ’tis
a chough; but, as I say, spacious in the possession of dirt.
 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
OSRIC: Sweet lord, if your lordship were at leisure, I should
impart a thing to you from his majesty.
HAMLET: I will receive it, sir, with all diligence of spirit.
Put your bonnet to his right use; ’tis for the head.
OSRIC: I thank your lordship, it is very hot.
HAMLET: No, believe me, ’tis very cold; the wind is north-
erly.
OSRIC: It is indifferent cold, my lord, indeed.
HAMLET: But yet methinks it is very sultry and hot for my
complexion.
OSRIC: Exceedingly, my lord; it is very sultry,—as ‘twere,—
I cannot tell how. But, my lord, his majesty bade me signify
to you that he has laid a great wager on your head: sir, this is
the matter,—
HAMLET: I beseech you, remember—
[HAMLET moves him to put on his hat.]
OSRIC: Nay, good my lord; for mine ease, in good faith.
Sir, here is newly come to court Laertes; believe me, an ab-
102
solute gentleman, full of most excellent differences, of very
soft society and great showing: indeed, to speak feelingly of
him, he is the card or calendar of gentry, for you shall find in
him the continent of what part a gentleman would see.
HAMLET: Sir, his definement suffers no perdition in you;
though, I know, to divide him inventorially would dizzy the
arithmetic of memory, and yet but yaw neither, in respect of
his quick sail. But, in the verity of extolment, I take him to
be a soul of great article; and his infusion of such dearth and
rareness, as, to make true diction of him, his semblable is his
mirror; and who else would trace him, his umbrage, noth-
ing more.
OSRIC: Your lordship speaks most infallibly of him.
HAMLET: The concernancy, sir? why do we wrap the gentle-
man in our more rawer breath?
OSRIC: Sir?
HORATIO: Is’t not possible to understand in another
tongue?
You will do’t, sir, really.
HAMLET: What imports the nomination of this gentleman?
 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
OSRIC: Of Laertes?
HORATIO: His purse is empty already; all’s golden words
are spent.
HAMLET: Of him, sir.
OSRIC: I know you are not ignorant—
HAMLET: I would you did, sir; yet, in faith, if you did, it
would not much approve me. Well, sir?
OSRIC: You are not ignorant of what excellence Laertes
is—
HAMLET: I dare not confess that, lest I should compare
with him in excellence; but, to know a man well, were to
know himself.
OSRIC: I mean, sir, for his weapon; but in the imputation
laid on him by them, in his meed he’s unfellowed.
HAMLET: What’s his weapon?
OSRIC: Rapier and dagger.
HAMLET: That’s two of his weapons: but, well.
103
OSRIC: The king, sir, hath wagered with him six Barbary
horses: against the which he has imponed, as I take it, six
French rapiers and poniards, with their assigns, as girdle,
hangers, and so: three of the carriages, in faith, are very dear
to fancy, very responsive to the hilts, most delicate carriages,
and of very liberal conceit.
HAMLET: What call you the carriages?
HORATIO: I knew you must be edified by the margent ere
you had done.
OSRIC: The carriages, sir, are the hangers.
HAMLET: The phrase would be more german to the mat-
ter, if we could carry cannon by our sides: I would it might
be hangers till then. But, on: six Barbary horses against six
French swords, their assigns, and three liberal-conceited car-
riages; that’s the French bet against the Danish. Why is this
‘imponed,’ as you call it?
OSRIC: The king, sir, hath laid, that in a dozen passes be-
tween yourself and him, he shall not exceed you three hits:
he hath laid on twelve for nine; and it would come to imme-
diate trial, if your lordship would vouchsafe the answer.
HAMLET: How if I answer ‘no’?
 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
OSRIC: I mean, my lord, the opposition of your person in it. Thus has he—and many more of the same bevy that I
trial. know the dressy age dotes on—only got the tune of the time
and outward habit of encounter; a kind of yesty collection,
HAMLET: Sir, I will walk here in the hall: if it please his which carries them through and through the most fond and
majesty, ’tis the breathing time of day with me; let the foils winnowed opinions; and do but blow them to their trial,
be brought, the gentleman willing, and the king hold his the bubbles are out.
purpose, I will win for him an I can; if not, I will gain noth-
ing but my shame and the odd hits. [Enter a Lord.]

OSRIC: Shall I re-deliver you e’en so? Lord: My lord, his majesty commended him to you by young
Osric, who brings back to him that you attend him in the
HAMLET: To this effect, sir; after what flourish your na- hall: he sends to know if your pleasure hold to play with
ture will. Laertes, or that you will take longer time.

OSRIC: I commend my duty to your lordship. HAMLET: I am constant to my purpose; they follow the
king’s pleasure: if his fitness speaks, mine is ready; now or
HAMLET: Yours, yours. whensoever, provided I be so able as now.

[Exit OSRIC.] Lord: The king and queen and all are coming down.

He does well to commend it himself; there are no tongues HAMLET: In happy time.
else for’s turn.
Lord: The queen desires you to use some gentle entertain-
HORATIO: This lapwing runs away with the shell on his ment to Laertes before you fall to play.
head.
HAMLET: She well instructs me.
HAMLET: He did comply with his dug, before he sucked
104
 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
[Exit Lord.]
HORATIO: You will lose this wager, my lord.
HAMLET: I do not think so: since he went into France, I
have been in continual practice: I shall win at the odds. But
thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart:
but it is no matter.
HORATIO: Nay, good my lord,—
HAMLET: It is but foolery; but it is such a kind of gain-
giving, as would perhaps trouble a woman.
HORATIO: If your mind dislike any thing, obey it: I will
forestall their repair hither, and say you are not fit.
HAMLET: Not a whit, we defy augury: there’s a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to
come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now,
yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught
of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?
[Enter KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE,
LAERTES, Lords, OSRIC, and Attendants with foils,
&c.]
105
KING CLAUDIUS: Come, Hamlet, come, and take this
hand from me.
[KING CLAUDIUS puts LAERTES’ hand into
HAMLET’s.]
HAMLET: Give me your pardon, sir: I’ve done you wrong;
But pardon’t, as you are a gentleman.
This presence knows,
And you must needs have heard, how I am punish’d
With sore distraction. What I have done,
That might your nature, honor and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was’t Hamlet wrong’d Laertes? Never Hamlet:
If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away,
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it, then? His madness: if’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wrong’d;
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.
Sir, in this audience,
Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil
Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,
That I have shot mine arrow o’er the house,
And hurt my brother.
LAERTES: I am satisfied in nature,
 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
Whose motive, in this case, should stir me most HAMLET: Very well, my lord
To my revenge: but in my terms of honor Your grace hath laid the odds o’ the weaker side.
I stand aloof; and will no reconcilement,
Till by some elder masters, of known honor, KING CLAUDIUS: I do not fear it; I have seen you both:
I have a voice and precedent of peace, But since he is better’d, we have therefore odds.
To keep my name ungored. But till that time,
I do receive your offer’d love like love, LAERTES: This is too heavy, let me see another.
And will not wrong it.
HAMLET: This likes me well. These foils have all a length?
HAMLET: I embrace it freely;
And will this brother’s wager frankly play. [They prepare to play.]
Give us the foils. Come on.
OSRIC: Ay, my good lord.
LAERTES: Come, one for me.
KING CLAUDIUS: Set me the stoops of wine upon that
HAMLET: I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance table.
Your skill shall, like a star i’ the darkest night, If Hamlet give the first or second hit,
Stick fiery off indeed. Or quit in answer of the third exchange,
Let all the battlements their ordnance fire:
LAERTES: You mock me, sir. The king shall drink to Hamlet’s better breath;
And in the cup an union shall he throw,
HAMLET: No, by this hand. Richer than that which four successive kings
In Denmark’s crown have worn. Give me the cups;
KING CLAUDIUS: Give them the foils, young Osric. And let the kettle to the trumpet speak,
Cousin Hamlet, The trumpet to the cannoneer without,
You know the wager? The cannons to the heavens, the heavens to earth,
‘Now the king dunks to Hamlet.’ Come, begin:
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 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
And you, the judges, bear a wary eye. Come.

HAMLET: Come on, sir. [They play.]

LAERTES: Come, my lord. Another hit; what say you?

[They play.] LAERTES: A touch, a touch, I do confess.

HAMLET: One. KING CLAUDIUS: Our son shall win.

LAERTES: No. QUEEN GERTRUDE: He’s fat, and scant of breath.

Here, Hamlet, take my napkin, rub thy brows;
HAMLET: Judgment. The queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet.

OSRIC: A hit, a very palpable hit. HAMLET: Good madam!

LAERTES: Well; again. KING CLAUDIUS: Gertrude, do not drink.

KING CLAUDIUS: Stay; give me drink. Hamlet, this pearl QUEEN GERTRUDE: I will, my lord; I pray you, pardon me.
is thine;
Here’s to thy health. KING CLAUDIUS: [Aside] It is the poison’d cup: it is too
late.
[Trumpets sound, and cannon shot off within.]
HAMLET: I dare not drink yet, madam; by and by.
Give him the cup.
QUEEN GERTRUDE: Come, let me wipe thy face.
HAMLET: I’ll play this bout first; set it by awhile.
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 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
LAERTES: My lord, I’ll hit him now. OSRIC: Look to the queen there, ho!

KING CLAUDIUS: I do not think’t. HORATIO: They bleed on both sides. How is it, my lord?

LAERTES: [Aside] And yet ’tis almost ‘gainst my con-
science.
HAMLET: Come, for the third, Laertes: you but dally;
I pray you, pass with your best violence;
I am afeard you make a wanton of me.
OSRIC: How is’t, Laertes?
LAERTES: Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric;
I am justly kill’d with mine own treachery.
HAMLET: How does the queen?

LAERTES: Say you so? come on. KING CLAUDIUS: She swounds to see them bleed.

[They play.] QUEEN GERTRUDE: No, no, the drink, the drink,—
O my dear Hamlet,—
OSRIC: Nothing, neither way. The drink, the drink! I am poison’d.

LAERTES: Have at you now! [Dies.]

[LAERTES wounds HAMLET; then in scuffling, they change HAMLET: O villany! Ho! let the door be lock’d:
rapiers, and HAMLET wounds LAERTES.] Treachery! Seek it out.

KING CLAUDIUS: Part them; they are incensed. LAERTES: It is here, Hamlet: Hamlet, thou art slain;
No medicine in the world can do thee good;
HAMLET: Nay, come, again. In thee there is not half an hour of life;
The treacherous instrument is in thy hand,
[QUEEN GERTRUDE falls.] Unbated and envenom’d: the foul practice
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 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
Hath turn’d itself on me lo, here I lie, [Dies.]
Never to rise again: thy mother’s poison’d:
I can no more: the king, the king’s to blame. HAMLET: Heaven make thee free of it! I follow thee.
I am dead, Horatio. Wretched queen, adieu!
HAMLET: The point!—envenom’d too! You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
Then, venom, to thy work. That are but mutes or audience to this act,
Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, death,
[Stabs KING CLAUDIUS.] Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead;
All: Treason! treason! Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
KING CLAUDIUS: O, yet defend me, friends; I am but
hurt. HORATIO: Never believe it:
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane:
HAMLET: Here, thou incestuous, murderous, damned Here’s yet some liquor left.
Dane,
Drink off this potion. Is thy union here? HAMLET: As thou’rt a man,
Follow my mother. Give me the cup: let go; by heaven, I’ll have’t.
O good Horatio, what a wounded name,
[KING CLAUDIUS dies.] Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
LAERTES: He is justly served; Absent thee from felicity awhile,
It is a poison temper’d by himself. And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet: To tell my story.
Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee,
Nor thine on me. [March afar off, and shot within.]

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 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
What warlike noise is this?
OSRIC: Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland,
To the ambassadors of England gives
This warlike volley.
HAMLET: O, I die, Horatio;
The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit:
I cannot live to hear the news from England;
But I do prophesy the election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;
So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,
Which have solicited. The rest is silence.
[Dies.]
HORATIO: Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet
prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
Why does the drum come hither?
[March within.]
[Enter FORTINBRAS, the English Ambassadors, and others.]
PRINCE FORTINBRAS: Where is this sight?
110
HORATIO: What is it ye would see?
If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.
PRINCE FORTINBRAS: This quarry cries on havoc. O
proud death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
First Ambassador: The sight is dismal;
And our affairs from England come too late:
The ears are senseless that should give us hearing,
To tell him his commandment is fulfill’d,
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead:
Where should we have our thanks?
HORATIO: Not from his mouth,
Had it the ability of life to thank you:
He never gave commandment for their death.
But since, so jump upon this bloody question,
You from the Polack wars, and you from England,
Are here arrived give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view;
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
 Hamlet, Act V, scene ii
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, [A dead march. Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies; after which
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook a peal of ordnance is shot off.]
Fall’n on the inventors’ reads: all this can I
Truly deliver.

PRINCE FORTINBRAS: Let us haste to hear it,

And call the noblest to the audience. If you would like to read more
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune: Shakespeare in PDF, return to our
I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,
Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me. Sakespeare site:
HORATIO: Of that I shall have also cause to speak, http://www2.hn.psu.edu/
And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more;
But let this same be presently perform’d, faculty/jmanis/shake.htm.
Even while men’s minds are wild; lest more mischance
On plots and errors, happen.

PRINCE FORTINBRAS: Let four captains

b
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; If you would like to return to PSU’s
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage, Electronic Clasics Series site, go to
The soldiers’ music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
http://www2.hn.psu.edu/
Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
faculty/jmanis/jimspdf.htm.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

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